[publican-list] newbie observations on building publican from SVN

[Jeffrey Fearn]

Hi Robert, I'm putting the finishing touches on a hobby project I've 
been working on of rewriting publican in perl. This will change lots of 
things, including making half the UG obsolete and removing all Makefiles.

The Red Hat docs team are organizing a public beta test to give the 
rewrite a flogging.

I'll do my best to respond to the issues you have raised, but a few of 
them will basically be "I already killed that bit" :)

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   from the perspective of someone who built publican from the repo for
> the very first time a few minutes ago:
> 
> * the README file suggests i can get make help with one of "make help"
> or "make help_params".  neither of those targets seem to be supported.

This relates to commands you can run in a book not the publican build. 
This has all completely changed so this file will have to be completely 
rewritten.

> * the build on a fully-updated f11 x86_64 system generates numerous
> "... Legal_Notice.po MISSING Using en-US file" warnings.  doesn't stop
> the build, though.

This is kind of correct, the Legal Notice file should never be 
translated. But there isn't a way to mark pages as "never translate" ... 
that would be a cool function :D

> * doing a straight "make" clearly attempts to *install* the
> constructed rpm.  that's kind of unusual, isn't it?  i'm more used to
> having to do that explicitly, with "make install".  only after i
> looked at the Makefile did i see the more limited "make rpm" target.

The make files are heinous! The rewrite uses Module::Build and works as 
expected.

Cheers, Jeff.

-- 
Jeff Fearn <jfearn at redhat.com>
Software Engineer
Engineering Operations
Red Hat, Inc
Freedom ... courage ... Commitment ... ACCOUNTABILITY
http://file.bne.redhat.com/~jfearn/