Re: [bug #41125] -make documentation is un-installable

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 8 Jan 2014, at 14:57, Sebastian Reitenbach <address@hidden> wrote:

> 
> On Wednesday, January 8, 2014 14:54 CET, Richard Frith-Macdonald 
> <address@hidden> wrote: 
> 
>> 
>> On 8 Jan 2014, at 12:38, Markus Hitter <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>>> Am 08.01.2014 13:11, schrieb Niels Grewe:
>>>> Markus expects it to use the configuration you just set using make’s
>>>> configure script, while it in fact will use the configuration of the
>>>> last installed version of gnustep-make.
>> 
>> I eventually got that.
>> 
>>> Thank you. That's entirely the point. Because in some environments there
>>> is no "last installed version of gnustep-make".
>> 
>> I'd still like to know why you can't set one up?
> 
> I think this is mostly a problem packagers are facing.
> For example, I create a package for gnustep-make, then install it.
> But then, I'm done with it. at least on OpenBSD, there is no 
> easy way, to rely on an installed version of the same package,
> to build additional components out of it.

> 
> With a lot of dirty tricks, I likely could get around it, maybe use
> the installed version from the "fake" stage in the packaging process
> to generate the documentation. But that would likely end up in
> something very ugly.
> 
> Since as I understand Markus has the similar/same problem
> for his Debian or Ubuntu packages, I can guess others for other SO/distros
> face similar problems. I don't know, Fred, aren't you experimenting
> with GNUstep packages on the SUSE build server, how is it working
> there for you?
> 
> For that matter, if the gnustep-make package would support
> generating and installing the documentation in one go, i.e.
> ./configure
> make
> make install       (which would go for me on OpenBSD into a fake environment)
> make install-docs  (that would use the values from configure, and also 
> install in that fake environment)
> 
> or an "install-all" (installing the makefiles and the docs with one command)

I'm sure you could do that quite easily ... sounds like a good idea as a 
convenience.

But even without that, my assumption about package building is that when 
packaging you basically always run a script to build/install the software in a 
location for the packaging system  to wrap up into the actual package archive 
format.
That script ought to be able to either use a pre-installed copy of gnustep-make 
(ie when you have already packaged it and then installed it, so its a 
dependency of the package you are building now) or use the copy it's packaging, 
or install a local temporary copy to use.

So, for instance, the last case you suggest (installing gnustep-make  and its 
documentsation together),  the script might do:

configure ...
export DESTDIR=...
make install
export GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES=...
cd Documentation
make install

Yes, that's three commands longer than if you had 'make install-all', but does 
it matter in a script?

So it must be here that I'm missing something ... the reason why the packaging 
process can't execute a script to build a package perhaps?  Are there package 
builders that prohibit the use of siomple scripts like this?  If so, how do 
they actually build things?