Re: Chicken/egg problem building from a 'git clone'

[John Tapsell <johnflux@gmail.com>]

2009/3/6 Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, 6 Mar 2009, Jakub Narebski wrote:
>
>> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
>> > On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 01:38:27PM +0100, Matthieu Moy wrote:
>> >
>> >>>> * we have lots other files in git.git that are autogenerated (the
>> >>>> documentation files, for example)
>> >>>
>> >>> I'm not aware of any auto-generated files that are checked in. Can you
>> >>> give an example?
>> >>
>> >> man pages and html docs are commited, but in a separate branch. IOW,
>> >> Junio abuses Git as a distribution mechanism, but keeps it totally
>> >> separate from the actual sources.
>> >
>> > OK, true; but that is a totally different mechanism, unless the proposal
>> > is to autobuild a "this would be the release tarball" branch similar to
>> > html and man branches.
>>
>> I thnk the proposal was to have 'configure' branch with configure
>> script built, similar to how 'html' and 'man' branches have built
>> documentation in HTML and manpages format.
>>
>> However while toolchain needed to produce documentation (asciidoc +
>> xmlto) isn't, I think, something very common, in my opinion autoconf is
>> something that is present on systems containing other build tools
>> required to build git from sources.  So 'configure' branch is not, I
>> think, as necessary as 'html' and 'man' branches; additionally 'html'
>> branch (or the repository used to build documentation, or the byproduct
>> of building documentation) is used to generate on-line docs for git.
>
> Plus, keep in mind that autoconf support is only an afterthought in Git;
> Just running "make" is supposed to work.  If it does not, patches are
> certainly welcome, I think.

Well now that you mention it.. :-)

It doesn't check for the existance of asciidoc, but blindly assumes it
exists.  And even if you do have asciidoc, there's a good chance that
you have the wrong version.   The INSTALL file says that asciidoc
requires 8.2.7 but most distros (debian, ubuntu.  probably other) have
8.2.6.
If you compile the docs with the wrong asciidoc version, there is no
warning or error at all.  It just builds incorrect man pages.

John