Publican Issues

[Jeff Fearn]

John J. McDonough wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric Christensen"
> <eric at christensenplace.us>
> To: <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 5:34 PM
> Subject: Publican Issues
> 
>> meeting we will discuss Publican and how to go forward.  Right now I can
>> see five options for moving forward:
>>
>> 1. Use Publican for a guide but munge through to an RPM that Fedora will
>> consume; use jjmcd's script or a new .spec file
>> 2. Fork Publican and remove the variable that puts the version # in the
>> name

No need to do this, I'll move a copy internal and you can have the fedora
hosted repo if you want.

>> 3. Get the Packaging Committee to amend the rules

Good luck getting the blind to see.

>> 4. Use Publican for HTML + PDF and fedora-doc-utils for RPM
>> 5. Use f-doc-utils exclusively
> 
> Let me provide some pre-meeting input here.
> 
> Last week I got thinking that I needed to learn more about how we
> implement multiple languages.  It wasn't clear to me that Publican
> creates these various languanges in the same way f-doc-utils does, and I
> wanted to be confident that I could come up with an equivalent RPM.  I
> was very confident about a single-language RPM, but I just don't
> understand how the language gets selected.
> 
> So I tried to add a couple of languages to the F11 release notes and I
> kept getting errors.  I also tried making a small Publican doc and
> adding languages, same errors.  I fought this for a while without
> success, but last night rudi grabbed my sources and discovered that the
> error was a known bug (I had just assumed I was doing something wrong)
> to be fixed in 0.44.  He had a workaround, and I was able to get
> Publican to generate RPMs for my test languages.

0.44 is in the testing repo waiting for enough karma to be pushed live. I
asked for it to be pushed live.

> Well, that is the first problem.  Publican generates an RPM per
> language. Probably not insurmountable to munge these together,
> especially if we are rebuilding the RPM.  But I ran into some
> strangeness.  It looks as if during the rpmbuild Publican treats the
> non-English languages differently.  I still have more to explore to
> completely understand this, but it does make me less confident that we
> can beat it into submission quickly.

In the SVN repo look at old_srpm2 and old_spec2 in
publican-redhat/make/Makefile.Redhat. This is how we used to publish docs
for RHEL5. The related xsl files are in publican-redhat/xsl/

It very quickly became an unmaintainable approach for books of any size.

People get really pissed when they have to d/l 200MB to get a typo fixed
when they only read 1 language. This will be exacerbated for fedora where
many more languages are supported.

This is only kept around because we have to support the shipped books, it
really is a sub optimal distribution method and limits you ability to have
nifty yum groups and such.

i.e. 'yum installgroup latin-docs' for all you Latin docs needs.

Marginally useful for Release Notes for obvious reasons, however, being
able to ship the English to beta testers before the translations is likely
reduce the impact of errata on translations should they occur.

Cheers, Jeff.

-- 
Jeff Fearn <jfearn at redhat.com>
Software Engineer
Engineering Operations
Red Hat, Inc
Freedom ... courage ... Commitment ... ACCOUNTABILITY