Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Various news

[Benjamin J. Tarval]

> From address@hidden  Thu Aug 30 08:45:01 2001
> To: "Benjamin J. Tarval" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Various news
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
>
> Ben,  send me your savanah user name and I'll give you write access
> to the repository.  We should get the FAQ checked in, integrate your
> patch, etc.  Thanks for working on the configure/autoconf stuff as
> well as VrAudioSource...
>
> Please coordinate with me prior to actually committing.  Thanks.

Certainly; this would be my pleasure.

Regarding the the FAQ; that's fairly straightforward. But I'd like to ask
the community to examine and try out (or at least inspect) the patch before
I put this back into the tree. The patch is rather extensive; 74 files or so.
You see, each Makefile had to be renamed to "Makefile.in" for configure.
And then all the appropriate Makefiles had to be taught how to work together.

Furthermore, the problem with generating the patch is that it is easy to 
trash a newer version of any file. For example, I believe that you checked
in some of the files in src/drivers/[char, user] at the end of July. I was
originally working with a snapshot from the middle of July. Unfortunately,
I thought the entire tree contained a static 1.1 version; and didn't realize
that it was being updated.

What this means is that when I upgraded, the patch I generated would've
wiped out your changes. It was only by going through a painstaking process
and being careful that I noticed this. I had to be very careful not to wipe
out anything new. I *think* I've got it right; but with so many changes, 
I'd like someone else to double-check my efforts here. 

This was a pain; and there are several things we can do to improve this
process - but I'd like to leave that until after we have all the new
Makefiles in place.

> I'm not sure how to get the FAQ to automatically appear in both the
> web and source trees.   Perhaps the source should just refer to the
> the web page url. 

I've come to the conclusion that the entire FAQ generating process
can benefit by some serious development. Right now it is just text,
but needs to be put into html and other formats. As well as different
languages.

To do this efficiently, I can envision a source tree here at some point,
along with a build process. E.g. Doing a 'make install' to generate all
the different formats, as well as possibly pushing it onto the appropriate
web sites. I'm sure there are some existing solutions for this; but I've
never looked into it.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be interested.

What I'm driving at here is that we should be able to publish the versions
at savannah.gnu.org and anywhere else at the same time; and should strive
towards that goal. And put the FAQ source tree up on savannah as well,
when we get there.

        -ben-