[ANNOUNCE] xorg-sgml-doctools-1.2

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 04 March 2007, Drew Parsons wrote:
>On Sun, 2007-03-04 at 22:01 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> On Sunday 04 March 2007, Ben Byer wrote:
>> >DocBook is a compiler for documentation, much like GCC is a compiler
>> >for C code.  (Note that both of them have complicated command-line
>> >syntax!)
>> >
>> >1. You (as a user) never see DocBook data; you get man pages (and
>> >sometimes online help in HTML).  Much like how users generally aren't
>> >expected to "run" C source files.
>>
>> Perhaps I'm still miss-understanding how it works.  The program tree I
>> was referring to above was the amanda-2.5.1p3-20070222 snapshot.  I
>> did not do anything unusual other than my usual ./gh.cf script that I
>> use to drive the configure program with consistent options data, this
>> scripts last line is make.  The tree has a docs dir that is all .txt
>> files.  It has, in this same root of its srcs dir, a man directory,
>> which now contains all the manpages, dated when I built it on feb
>> 22nd.  Within this man dir is an xml-sources dir, and all the files
>> there are much older, so they came from the tarball.  Ergo the
>> manpages I see there were built by the main Makefile which in turn
>> sourced the Makefiles in those 2 dirs and built the manpages.  They
>> did it fairly quietly, so all I actually noticed was the manpages
>> being installed.  My mistake.
>>
>> Now I understand that much better than before, but it obviously
>> becomes the packagers responsibility if I were to type 'man
>> fetchmailrc' and get told it doesn't exist.  It does of course, but
>> that's an example only.
>
>It sounds like you might be confusing the tarball containing the
>original source with the final package which users install (the .rpm
>file for your Fedora system).
>
>As you noticed, opening a tarball and running its make scripts leaves
>the compiled program and man pages in the directory where you opened the
>tarball.  But they are not yet installed on your system.
>
>The man program generally checks for manpages in /usr/share/man, so it
>won't know about these new manpages which you just compiled from the
>tarball.  You can tell man to read any arbitrary file by using the -l
>command line option ("local file") in front of the filename.
>
>You can generally install the programs and docs you built from the
>tarball by running "make install".  This might place the new man pages
>into /usr/share/man, or maybe into /usr/local/man.  Running "make
>install" like this can be dangerous if it writes over existing files,
>since it's outside your system's normal package management and so it
>will lose track of what's been installed by which package.  If you can
>do so, you'd be better off turning your compiled files into an rpm
>package and install that instead.  But either way once it's done man
>should be able to find your manpages without the -l option.
>
>Good luck,
>
>Drew

man doesn't have any problem finding the installed manpages.

As for making an rpm out of amanda, that requires that its security model 
be heavily damaged in order to fit within the installation parameters 
available to rpm.  So I think not, this is one case where the rpm does 
more damage than its record keeping is worth.  I've been installing from 
the tarballs for probably 8 or 9 years now, and if you follow the 
directions, it Just Works(TM)..  I know its there, and I even call up mc 
and go clean up the old versions left laying around in its libs directory 
from time to time.  rpm doesn't know its there, so yum, smart et all 
don't bug me to upgrade.  The fact that rpm doesn't know about it suits 
both amanda and me just fine.



-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.