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Re: texi2html coming back soon in tetex ?
- From: "James R. Phillips" <antiskid56-cygwin at yahoo dot com>
- To: cygwin-apps at cygwin dot com
- Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 09:38:48 -0700 (PDT)
- Subject: Re: texi2html coming back soon in tetex ?
- Reply-to: antiskid56-cygwin at yahoo dot com
--- Brian Dessent wrote:
> Until about a month ago the Cygwin build process itself required
> texi2html, even though it was not available in any current package, and
> nobody objected. People building Cygwin have long been told to use
> "make -k" so that doc building stuff doesn't cause the build to stop on
> missing tools. For something that's tangential to the main
> functionality of a package, I'd say it's not entirely critical that
> every build tool be available in package form, especially if so noted in
> the readme.
>
> Brian
>
There may be precedent, but it doesn't sound like good policy for most
packages. I note that building of Cygwin itself is sort of a singular point -
you can't use the normal tool chain - so it doesn't sound like a strong
precedent to me.
Comparison to Debian: when I download a Debian source package, apt-get can
automate the installation of the build-depends, and at the end of the build, I
should have the same exact binary package as is on the mirrors. And in fact
Debian developers don't upload binary, they upload source. Build daemons build
the binary semi-automatically. If the package fails to build, it can't be
uploaded to a mirror.
Now admittedly, Cygwin is not Debian, and does not enforce Debian policies and
procedures. Nevertheless, I think the best policy for my Cygwin packages is
that they build from source after installing all build-depends from Cygwin
setup.exe. I think that is a reasonable and coherent policy, and intend to
follow it where at all possible.
I installed texi2html from Debian sarge into the Cygwin octave source tree, and
modified the build script to use it - seems to have worked, although there are
other problems to solve as well. So it appears my policy is workable in this
case.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments.
JRP