Re: Specifying and build output separately?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Hartmut Goebel <address@hidden> skribis:

> we have several cyclic dependencies due to e.g. packages depending on
> each other only for building the documentation. Examples are numpy and
> matpltlib.
>
> So I wonder it it would be possible to to something like this:
>
> (define-public numpy:doc
>   (inherit numpy)
>   (name "numpy:doc")
>   (outputs "doc")
>   (inputs … matplotlib …)
>   (… modify-phases …))

Making the documentation a separate package, instead of a separate
output, is of course doable and it could help address the circular
reference issue.

Currently the approach used for numpy is a different one: there’s a
“bootstrap” package lacking documentation that is used as input to the
final package, which has an extra “doc” output.

I prefer this approach over what you propose because it’s more
consistent with what we usually do, which is to have doc in a “doc”
output rather than in a separate package.

Thanks,
Ludo’.