[Xcb] XCB documentation effort status update

[Josh Triplett]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 10:15:09PM +0000, Michael Stapelberg wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have now modified auto* so that it installs the manpages, also they are no
> longer written to /tmp/man but to src/man/ instead.
> 
> See my commits at https://github.com/mstap/libxcb/commits/master
> 
> Now, there is one problem:
> 
> 1) xcb-proto contains the protocol description, as you know, and therefore the
>    list of manpages depends on it – if there is a new request, there needs to
>    be a new manpage.
> 
> 2) In libxcb, the manpages are generated when c_client.py is called on each
>    xcb-proto xml file (at compile time).
> 
> 3) Autotools needs to know the list of files at autogen-time (before
>    compiling).
> 
> So, how can we tell Autotools which manpages it needs to install when we don’t
> actually know at that point in time?
> 
> At the moment, I am bundling a file called src/list_of_manpages.inc which is
> generated when running c_client.py with the new -m option. However, this file
> has to be kept up-to-date manually, which is bad.
> 
> Do you have any ideas on how to solve this problem in a better way?

We've had that problem before with the list of extensions, as well.
Ideally we'd like to do some autogeneration based on xcb-proto, except
that as far as I can tell, autotools doesn't seem to allow
autogeneration of that information; it has to live in the .am file, and
configure doesn't even work with the .am files, it works with the
generated .in files.  I don't know a good solution, but we definitely
need one.

- Josh Triplett