[Xapian-devel] xapian & debian

[Olly Betts]

This is mostly for Richard, but others may have useful thoughts too.

I just took a look at the debian stuff.  It's generally looking good
(though I haven't actually tried to build the debs).  A few comments
on items in TODO:

> xapian-doc: in index.html, there is one broken link (which occurs in
> two places, pointing to the full source documentation, since we don't
> generate the full for xapian source documentation).  We could move
> this to point to the xapian website.

This isn't debian specific - it should be fixed generically.

> There should almost certainly be a link back to the front page of the
> Xapian website, too.  The documentation should also probably be in the
> style of the Xapian website, and should use the Xapian logo on the
> front page.

Another generic one.  It is annoying that the docs and bugzilla (save
the front page) don't fit in with the website style.  I couldn't see an
easy fix though...

> We don't Build-Depend on graphviz because this would mean that this
> wouldn't be able to go into the "main" archive in Debian, because
> graphviz is non-free.

Do you need to Build-Depend on graphviz?  The xapian-core tarball
includes the documentation prebuilt.

Debian might have issues with docs which can't be rebuilt without using
non DFSG-free tools - I found some inconclusive discussion of this in
the archives of debian-devel.  Even if Debian are OK, it would be better
to not rely on non-free tools...

> To ensure we generate consistent packages whether dot is available or not, we
> need to follow one of these possible approaches:
>  1) Ensure that "dot" isn't used when generating documentation.  Needs new
>     configure option (note - just adding "DOT=" to configure options doesn't
>     work).

That's sort of deliberate.  The aim is to make sure people building
tarballs build the documentation correctly and consistently.  That could
be achieved more subtlely though...

>  2) find a free replacement for dot, and build-depend on it.  (there's one for
>     neato (springgraph), so maybe there's one for dot).
>  3) write a free replacement for dot.

Take a look at VCG (debian package vcg).  It's GPL and the closest thing
to a free replacement for dot I know of.

Moving on from TODO...

I don't think that the queryparser warrants a separate package.  It's
small compared to the main API, so splitting it off mostly adds package
overhead and potential for user confusion rather than saving much space
(for a random version I have to hand, the queryparser shared library is
78960 bytes stripped while the main library is 2710216 stripped - that's
under 3%).  Or is the split for so versioning reasons?

What's the reason for using --enable-maintainer-mode and then adding
build-depends on bison, autotools-dev, doxygen, perl5, latex, and dvips?
Is that just because of the non-free dot issue?

We should also perhaps consider providing "-dbg" package too, with a debug
build of the library.  I'm not sure exactly what debug configuration is
most appropriate though.

Cheers,
    Olly