gtk-doc woes

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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On 10/12/2005 4:34 PM, Carol Spears wrote:
> not this group also!
> 
> i had no problems editing ./autogen.sh where necessary since
> xfce-developers and debian have a different idea of which auto* versions
> get the symlink.  
> 
> now i am faced with this:
> carol at treva:/build/xfce/trunk/libxfce4mcs$ ./autogen.sh 
> xdt-autogen: You must have "gtk-doc" installed. You can get if from
>              http://www.gtk.org/gtk-doc/.
[snip]
> 
> i really really really have an issue with docbook.  not docbook itself,
> but the need to install all of that stuff so that you can make sgml
> files -- and i think that this is the only reason that there exists such
> a complex system whose job is to simply produce html.
> 
> i whined and threw a righteous fit until the gimp developers found a way
> to allow autogen to do its things without the need to make the
> documentation.  would it be possible for me to ask nicely here and get
> this?  when i build gimp, i get a warning that i should not "make dist"
> which is a warning that i did not need; i am the wrong person to be
> building a copy of anything to be distributed....
> 
> i promise that if i need the documentation, i will find it myself or
> install the whole works so that i can read it....
> 
> help?

If you want to install the development version, you're going to have to
have a complete set of development tools installed.  If someone wants to
come up with a non-intrusive patch that makes gtk-doc optional for SVN
builds (while keeping the default of reqiuring it), then by all means,
they should submit it.  I personally have better things to do with my time.

At any rate, the messages you've encountered are related to building API
documentation for the core libraries, not for end-user documentation.  I
don't recall exactly, but I believe docbook is indeed optional for the
end-user docs.

IIRC, the problem with gtk-doc is that you can sometimes get a broken
configure script if it's not installed when you run autogen.  I believe
at one time we included the gtk-doc.m4 file in the case it didn't exist,
but that's a rather icky solution that can cause problems if you have a
newer version of gtk-doc installed.

Besides, if you're running a sane distro (among which Debian should
hopefully be), you should be able to install all that crap (yeah, I
agree, too many dependencies) with a single command.

	-brian

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