Re: package-vc-install fails to build docs

[Joseph Turner]

Thank you Ruijie Yu and Philip Kaludercic for your help!

Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:

> Ruijie Yu via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor
> <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:
>> I'm looking at the package-vc source code, and it doesn't seem to try to
>> autodetect any doc files at the moment.  Try adding `:doc` in your
>> `package-vc-install' call and see if anything changes.

Actually, it looks like extra plist elements like :doc are stripped away
in package-vc--unpack. package-vc--unpack doesn't pass its pkg-spec arg
along to package-vc--unpack-1. package-vc--unpack-1 then calls
package-vc--desc->spec, which gets the spec anew from ELPA IIUC.

Regardless, I believe the issue lies elsewhere, see below.

> Right, if you just pass a URL, then package-vc has no metadata.  But
> since org-transclusion is on ELPA, you can invoke it like this:
>
>   (package-vc-install 'org-transclusion)
>
> then it should re-use the package specification that GNU ELPA provides.
> If you invoke package-vc-install interactively, it would also prompt you
> with this package name.
>
> That being said, I just tried it out and it seems that it still doesn't
> work because of a discrepancy between the package specification on ELPA
> that mentions docs/org-transclusion.org to be the documentation file
>
>  (org-transclusion    :url "https://github.com/nobiot/org-transclusion";
>   :make "org-transclusion.org"
>   :doc "docs/org-transclusion.org"
>   :readme "README.org")
>
> and as you say the fact that the actual manual lies in
> docs/org-transclusion-manual.org.  But this is an issue that should
> either be fixed in ELPA if the maintainer wishes this file to be used,
> or upstream if this is a mistake.

nobiot (org-transclusion author) points out here
https://github.com/nobiot/org-transclusion/issues/182#issuecomment-1518676316
that docs/org-transclusion.org needs to be generated from
docs/org-transclusion-manual.org according to

:make "org-transclusion.org"

(search for ":make" in
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/elpa.git/plain/README )

It appears that package-vc hasn't been taught to make use of the :make
package spec key. A quick search inside of
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/elpa.git/tree/elpa-packages#n491
reveals only two other packages besides org-transclusion that use it.

>> I'm on recent master, what is your Emacs version?

GNU Emacs 30.0.50 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.30,
cairo version 1.16.0)

In conclusion, I think the issue is that package-vc doesn't yet support
the package spec :make key.

Cheers,

Joseph