Publican Documentation Naming

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 06:14:56PM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> On 03/31/2009 06:07 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > Now, that works fine for documentation too, in *that* case -- in other
> > words, if you make some changes to the basic Security Guide, you would
> > of course want to push out the newest Guide in all languages.  But
> > here's where the subpackage use breaks down: You never see packagers
> > issuing a new libfoo-devel package without libfoo changing.  And that
> > can *definitely* happen in documentation.
> 
> Sure. We see this happening all the time, for bug fixes.

Really?  People issue a libfoo-devel-1.0-2 package without a
concomitant libfoo-1.0-2 package?

> > For example, you could add a new, previously unused translation to
> > your Guide.  Using subpackaging, in order to issue it, you'd have to
> > rebuild the entire set of languages, and when you do, our build system
> > -- as far as I know -- won't let you just push the one new language
> > subpackage out.  It would require *all* the language subpackages to be
> > reissued, even if they hadn't changed at all.
> 
> You could, but how often does this _ACTUALLY_ happen?

I can tell you this happens VERY often, IME in Fedora Docs.

> > Here's another twist that might make subpackages even more
> > unpalatable.  It implies that there will be a *resistance* to pushing
> > out translation fixes quickly.  There will be a tendency to wait
> > before reissuing packages.  Subpackages may lower the workload for a
> > small Docs team -- you could only issue a quarterly update, or on some
> > other regular but liveable basis -- but arguably at the cost of
> > friction with the translation teams.
> 
> Honestly, if this is a significant enough problem to need solving, we
> should solve it with other mechanisms than overloading CVS with hundreds
> of otherwise identical packages.

Wait, are these identical?  AIUI the SRPMs contain different language
content.  The en-US SRPM has en-US DocBook XML content, the de-DE SRPM
has de-DE DocBook XML content, etc.

> We could find a way for koji to build specific subpackages for
> translated %doc packages. The spec files would need a set of
> conditionals, and we'd need to standardize on lang variables, then build
> a mechanism to pass the conditionals through to the builder.
> 
> I would prefer that mechanism, for example. I suspect that Jesse would
> too (but I'm CC'ing him in case I'm wrong).

In which case we're back to being stuck when we try to push those spec
changes back upstream to Publican, right?

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