Publican Issues for RNs

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 08:57:52AM -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
> Let me preface this by mentioning that I haven't got a clue about packaging,
> so assuming I am a complete idiot wouldn't be inappropriate.
>
> Eric discovered back in January that there are a couple of show stoppers to
> using Publican for Docs.  He thought he was going to get the issues fixed in
> a short time, but that hasn't happened, and it doesn't look like it will
> happen.  Eric developed a workaround by hacking Publican.  Unfortunately,
> using this approach would require everyone participating in Docs to have a
> hacked Publican, and the hack breaks Publican for other uses.  A switch
> would be nice, and acceptable to the Publican developers, but apparently it
> would take a lot of effort and there is only one maintainer.

Can Jeff Fearn or some other knowledgeable person explain here what's
needed for that switch?  We probably can find some resources for
writing that switch, but to do that we need to know what's required.

> Publican does almost everything we need to do between the wiki and the RPM,
> so we would really like to use it rather than the mish-mash of tools we
> currently have.
>
> There are two problems:
> 1) Publican names the package incorrectly
> 2) The .desktop file is handled differently than the reviewers would like
>
> Now it seems to me, worst case we could run Publican and then package the
> HTMLs manually.  But since Publican already does most of the heavy lifting,
> why not simply patch Publican's work after the fact.
>
> To this end, I made an attempt to do the following:
> 1) Unpack the SRPM produced by Publican, The SRPM has 2 files, a tarball and
> a specfile
> 2) Rename the tarball, which involves untarring and retarring it
> 3) Edit the specfile
> 4) rpmbuild

Publican also has a 'make tar-<LANG>' target for making just the tarball.

> I wrote down the details of what I did at
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jjmcd/Drafts/Converting_Publican_RPM_for_Fedora
>
> When I do this, the resulting RPM passes rpmlint, installs correctly, and
> seems to meet the guidelines.  What am I missing?  Well, appears to install
> correctly.  A menu entry appears and when I click on it I see release notes.
> Maybe there are less obvious things going on.
>
> As far as the .desktop file, I don't fully understand the issue here.  The
> code produced by Publican appears to be almost identical to that in the
> packaging guidelines on the wiki and very similar to what it is in the
> current release notes.  David Nally tells me of an entirely different way to
> deal with the .desktop file but I don't know enough to understand why it is
> better.
>
> So what I'm asking is:
> 1) Is this totally wrong-headed and we should be looking up another avenue
> 2) How can this approach be made better
> 3) Is there some other way

It might be helpful to have David or someone to describe the exact
issue with the .desktop file here, or just point us to a bug where we
can read about it.  I'm looking at Publican to see whether we could
add the needed stuff to /usr/share/publican/make/Makefile.fedora,
which would keep it in the Fedora brand package and away from where it
breaks other things that Red Hat might use internally.

If that ends up being a bad place to put things -- because the
Makefile.templates haven't been included yet at that point, perhaps --
then it would seem relatively easy to also have the Makefile.common
provide:

  ifeq "$(BRAND_MAKE)" "1"
  include $(COMMON_CONFIG)/make/Makefile.$(BRAND).post
  endif

After the global templates, and we can craft those targets as needed.
I'm not completely Makefile-ignorant, fortunately, after having spent
some time working on our FDP toolchain.  I'll try to help where I
can.  If Jeff's willing to take a patch like that, or if he can help
me understand where's a better place to put these sorts of
customizations, I'm up for writing them.  We really do not want to
have to punt this again for lack of elbow grease.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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