Re: Shipping man pages?
Mark Rosenstand <mark@borkware.net> writes:
Show 9 quoted lines
> On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 01:06 -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> If you are building from the source, please build from the
>> source. Everything you need is right there.
>
> But asciidoc is a royal PITA to package or install - it doesn't even
> provide a Makefile: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/userguide.html#X38
>
> Additionally it carries the whole docbook dependency chain with it.
That's a consequence of _your_ choice to build the documentation files from the source, when I give you preformatted files in html/man branches and/or prepackaged binary distributions. Even plain "make all" nor "make install" do not build them.
IOW, not my problem.
We accomplish things by saying "I did this, it solves my problem, and it would help others -- so I share", not by demanding others to do things for you by saying "If you do this, it would solve my problem. Now go do it". That's how open source works.
>> Why does this have to come up so often, and everybody who asks
>> for them never supplies the patch to do so?
>
> Because it seems like a political decision rather than a technical one
I do not see why that is political. Do you need a politician to tell you what is source and what isn't?
> (it's trivial to add the docs as a prerequisite for the dist target.)
Being trivial does not change things a whit, because I do not do things I consider useless only because they are trivial.
You have to first convince me that it is useful to others, and one way to do so is by showing that you care deeply enough about it -- doing the work yourself (instead of demanding _me_ to do something I do not believe is a good idea yet) is a good way to do so. That would tell me that it is a real problem to you. When that happens, I might start considering the possibility that a solution to that problem may be useful to other people.
And it actually makes things actively worse to whine without doing the work yourself when the necessary change is trivial. You are saying that you cannot be bothered to do that yourself even though the change is trivial, which implies you _can_ live without formatted pages just fine. The conclusion is that not having the formatted pages is not such a big deal to you (after all, asciidoc toolchain might be a bear to install, but the documents formatted in it are very easy to read in the source form).
Now, with a patch, Tilman showed us he cares deeply enough, so I'll take a look at it. Thanks, Tilman.
