Tweakability of fop documentation

[Gaetan Nadon]

On Thu, 2010-10-28 at 21:55 +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote:

> Gaetan Nadon <memsize at videotron.ca> (11/10/2010):
> > I don't mind giving more flexibility, but it will generate a
> > "defaults" war.
> 
> Talking about flexibility, I've got two remarks about fop:
>  - It uses format autodetection by default, using papersize and
>    locales settings. People building packages for distributions may
>    like the concept of build reproducibility and may want to build
>    stuff independently of the environment. It'd be nice to be able to
>    pass --noautosize without having to patch all specs/Makefile.am
>    files in Xorg packages.

One solution comes to mind. An Autoconf aware variable, say XMLTO_OPTS

The usage option would look like:

        Some influential environment variables:
          CC          C compiler command
          CFLAGS      C compiler flags
          LDFLAGS     linker flags, e.g. -L<lib dir> if you have libraries in a
                      nonstandard directory <lib dir>
          LIBS        libraries to pass to the linker, e.g. -l<library>
          CPPFLAGS    C/C++/Objective C preprocessor flags, e.g. -I<include dir> if
                      you have headers in a nonstandard directory <include dir>
          CPP         C preprocessor
          PKG_CONFIG  path to pkg-config utility
          XMLTO       Path to xmlto command
          XMLTO_OPTS  Options for xmlto command
          FOP         Path to fop command
          [...]

The makefile would be changed to:


        XMLTO_FLAGS = -m $(XSL_STYLESHEET) $(XMLTO_OPTS)


The command line invocation would be:

./configure XMLTO_OPTS="--noautosize"



>  - Fop is very chatty, and may clutter the build log with messages
>    which aren't going to be read except by a few developers (I'm not
>    even sure?). It'd be nice to be able to tell it to be less
>    chatty. Since no option seems to exist for that matter, I guess
>    it'll still be nice to be able to redirect its std{out,err} to
>    /dev/null…

A bit more tricky. Using Automake 1.11, you can the "silent rules" for
free.
All you see is:

           GEN      libXaw.txt

for the text conversion. For the pdf version, you see a bunch of
warnings.
The perfect solutions would be to fix the code so no warning is emitted.
Suppressing the output means the build log will not show errors either.
You can always pass >/dev/null 2>&1 in XMLTO_OPTS


> 
> What do you think?
> 
> (I've been playing around with libXaw for now, but I guess the same
> applies to all Xorg packages with reworked documentation handling.)

Now that the are distributed with the package they document, it make
sense that
it creates new requirements.


> 
> Mraw,
> KiBi.
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