Advise on Fedora RPM's

[Paul W. Frields]

OK, I spent a few hours this morning banging my head against the problem
(again), trying to mentally clarify additional issues.  There may be
significant opinion mixed with fact here, be wary...  Maybe this is just
more food for thought?

1.  We should have separate .noarch.rpm ("binary" RPM) packages for each
language.  Although the scrollkeeper/yelp and khelpcenter parts are
mostly XML and HTML files that simply don't take up much space, the
screenshots for things like the Installation Guide and other upcoming
works are going to drastically increase the size of these packages.  No
reason to burden all users with i18n they can't use.

The easiest way to do this is with subpackages in the .spec.in.common,
but that puts the namespacing as "fedora-doc-docname-en-0.14" instead of
"fedora-doc-en-docname-0.14".  Does it put a significant burden on the
user if "installing all docs for my LANG" means "yum install
fedora-doc-\*-LANG" instead of "yum install fedora-doc-LANG-\*"?  Should
we figure out how to do this with yum groups instead, having a
"Documentation/English," "Documentation/Italian," etc.?  Is such a thing
possible while *NOT* putting a burden on Core development to support
this confusion?

2.  To a significant extent, SRPMs will have duplicative content with
the RPMs; this is unavoidable and not really a problem /per se/.  There
shouldn't be any HTML in the SRPMs, just the DocBook-XML originals,
screenshots, etc.

3.  I've done the RPM building process about three different ways thus
far, none of them great, and each of them confusing in a unique way.  I
am going to try to flowchart something out to make the process a little
clearer to myself before I try again.  I keep getting hung up on when to
set up i18n templates and when not.  What makes this challenging is that
in order to make the process work, the OMFs, the specfile, and the
various tarballs must be coordinated in a pretty interesting little
ballet.  Back to the grindstone...

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
 Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
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