On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 2:28 PM Michał Górny <mgo...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Could you please read the proposed policy? It explicitly says you are > *not* supposed to force extra deps on users but build manpages for them. >
This seems like a significant increase in maintainer effort compared to just leaving things as they are for very little benefit. Simple revbumps turn into needing to do a separate build just to build the manpages, then package those up, host them somewhere, then fetch and install that from the ebuild. It would be easier to just make the whole package a binary package since then all the logic happens outside the ebuild, and all the ebuild does is fetch/install a tarball, which it would have to do anyway just for the manpages. Most packages with stable build systems take almost no effort to revbump, and this would add a fair bit of complexity. I suspect that you'll find far more maintainers stop going to the trouble to strip out the dependencies needed for building manpages vs maintaining two build systems in parallel, with one having no place to host it. Then whenever a maintainer disappears the package goes to maintainer-needed, and anybody who wants to touch it has to figure out how to build the manpages likely without the benefit of any scripts the original maintainer had lying around. If we REALLY wanted to do something like this it seems like it would be better to build some tooling around it. Maybe an eclass combined with a special USE flag like "man-build". A daemon would check for packages that have this IUSE and would build the package using it, which will generate the manpages. It would then store those pages using a standardized naming convention. The ebuild would inherit the eclass which would check if man-build was set, and if not it would automatically fetch and install the manpages built by the build server from the mirrors. Then ebuilds that currently have IUSE=man would just inherit the eclass and change to the man-build flag. That flag would only be used by the build servers and not by end users, unless they wanted to build their own manpages from scratch, which would work fine, as the flag would not suppress building the rest of the package. Really though I don't see THAT much benefit from doing either. -- Rich
