Publican Issues

[John J. McDonough]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Eric Christensen" <eric at christensenplace.us>
To: <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 5:34 PM
Subject: Publican Issues

> meeting we will discuss Publican and how to go forward.  Right now I can
> see five options for moving forward:
>
> 1. Use Publican for a guide but munge through to an RPM that Fedora will
> consume; use jjmcd's script or a new .spec file
> 2. Fork Publican and remove the variable that puts the version # in the
> name
> 3. Get the Packaging Committee to amend the rules
> 4. Use Publican for HTML + PDF and fedora-doc-utils for RPM
> 5. Use f-doc-utils exclusively

Let me provide some pre-meeting input here.

Last week I got thinking that I needed to learn more about how we implement 
multiple languages.  It wasn't clear to me that Publican creates these 
various languanges in the same way f-doc-utils does, and I wanted to be 
confident that I could come up with an equivalent RPM.  I was very confident 
about a single-language RPM, but I just don't understand how the language 
gets selected.

So I tried to add a couple of languages to the F11 release notes and I kept 
getting errors.  I also tried making a small Publican doc and adding 
languages, same errors.  I fought this for a while without success, but last 
night rudi grabbed my sources and discovered that the error was a known bug 
(I had just assumed I was doing something wrong) to be fixed in 0.44.  He 
had a workaround, and I was able to get Publican to generate RPMs for my 
test languages.

Well, that is the first problem.  Publican generates an RPM per language. 
Probably not insurmountable to munge these together, especially if we are 
rebuilding the RPM.  But I ran into some strangeness.  It looks as if during 
the rpmbuild Publican treats the non-English languages differently.  I still 
have more to explore to completely understand this, but it does make me less 
confident that we can beat it into submission quickly.

That being said, I still, for obvious selfish reasons, lean toward 
Publican-oriented solutions as opposed to f-docs-utils solutions.  Even if 
we have to use a forked Publican, I think we are better positioned for F12 
when we might have our needs rolled back in.

--McD