Publican Issues for RNs

[John J. McDonough]

Let me preface this by mentioning that I haven't got a clue about packaging,
so assuming I am a complete idiot wouldn't be inappropriate.

Eric discovered back in January that there are a couple of show stoppers to
using Publican for Docs.  He thought he was going to get the issues fixed in
a short time, but that hasn't happened, and it doesn't look like it will
happen.  Eric developed a workaround by hacking Publican.  Unfortunately,
using this approach would require everyone participating in Docs to have a
hacked Publican, and the hack breaks Publican for other uses.  A switch
would be nice, and acceptable to the Publican developers, but apparently it
would take a lot of effort and there is only one maintainer.

Publican does almost everything we need to do between the wiki and the RPM,
so we would really like to use it rather than the mish-mash of tools we
currently have.

There are two problems:
1) Publican names the package incorrectly
2) The .desktop file is handled differently than the reviewers would like

Now it seems to me, worst case we could run Publican and then package the
HTMLs manually.  But since Publican already does most of the heavy lifting,
why not simply patch Publican's work after the fact.

To this end, I made an attempt to do the following:
1) Unpack the SRPM produced by Publican, The SRPM has 2 files, a tarball and
a specfile
2) Rename the tarball, which involves untarring and retarring it
3) Edit the specfile
4) rpmbuild

I wrote down the details of what I did at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jjmcd/Drafts/Converting_Publican_RPM_for_Fedora


When I do this, the resulting RPM passes rpmlint, installs correctly, and
seems to meet the guidelines.  What am I missing?  Well, appears to install
correctly.  A menu entry appears and when I click on it I see release notes.
Maybe there are less obvious things going on.

As far as the .desktop file, I don't fully understand the issue here.  The
code produced by Publican appears to be almost identical to that in the
packaging guidelines on the wiki and very similar to what it is in the
current release notes.  David Nally tells me of an entirely different way to
deal with the .desktop file but I don't know enough to understand why it is
better.

So what I'm asking is:
1) Is this totally wrong-headed and we should be looking up another avenue
2) How can this approach be made better
3) Is there some other way

Thanks
--McD