Re: [Quilt-dev] Converting the latex documentation?

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Sunday, 26 March 2006 20:27, Martin Quinson wrote:
> Hello,
>
> quilt is currently used by 70 debian package to handle the delta between
> the debian version and the upstream one. With time, this number tends to
> grow.
>
> Unfortunately, this good news induce some extra load on my shoulder. Since
> we are listed in the build-dependency of a lot of packages, we shouldn't
> list too much other packages ourselves in order to reduce the possibility
> of circular build-dependencies which are naturally evil.

IMHO quilt has nothing to do in the build dependencies in the first place. Why 
doesn't a simple for loop that simply applies the patches in order with GNU 
patch suffice? In case people want to preserve the quilt metadata for easier 
hacking, I would propose to either use the existing patch wrapper in the loop 
(bin/patch-wrapper), or to create a script that performs the equivalent of 
``quilt push -a''.  I have nothing against adding such a script to the quilt 
cvs, so that we'll keep it in sync with metadata changes. This script could 
be packages independently; problem solved.

> For now, we have: cdbs, debhelper, gettext, gawk, hevea, lynx
>
> The first two ones are debian-specific stuff. I plan to rework the
> packaging to remove cdbs, but it's not the purpose of this mail.
>
> gettext and gawk are mandatory and that's not a big deal.
>
> But the last two ones are needed because of the LaTeX documentation, which
> needs a *lot* of stuff if you want text and htmp versions in addition to
> pdf.
>
> So, if nobody objects, I plan to convert the .tex documentation to the POD
> format (the perl online documentation). It is not as powerful as tex, but
> it can be converted to a large panel of formats without difficulties.
>
> Any objection?

Yes, if at all, we should switch to docbook-xml, but not POD. This would drag 
in a couple of other dependencies though...

Andreas