[darcs-users] darcs patch: Remove autoconf support and cut GNUmakefile to only bu...

[Petr Rockai]

trentbuck at gmail.com (Trent W. Buck) writes:

>> - make continuous: this is something we may want to get back -- the best
>>   approach I can think of is to patch searchpath to use cabal to do the work:
>>   either that, or write a new tool... original searchpath seems to be gone and
>>   it's a good deal of spaghetti with load of features we don't care about
>
> Why can't that functionality be folded into cabal?  It's hardly Darcs-specific.

I wish it could. But searchpath is unlikely to be used by cabal -- if you look
at its source, even though it's Haskell, it is one big mess. Sort of a
Haskell-encoded Perl script. It even seems to use curl to display its own help
output (wow). I wish someone could patch cabal to do the continuous aspect,
without all the other hacks.

>> I think the rest of the autoconf/make features is now substituted by cabal just
>> fine. I have retained "make tags" and "make website", with the latter being
>> lightly crippled: it expects that a standard cabal build has happened (leaving
>> behind dist/build/darcs/darcs) and it uses latex2html unconditionally.
>
> latex2html is not DFSG-compliant.  But everyone seems to use it
> anyway... :-(

Yes: I just saw that latex2html is hardcoded elsewhere in the GNUmakefile, so I
kept that alternative -- presumably, Kowey uses that to build whatever's on
darcs.net.

>> I think this is it. I'm looking forward to having at least the manual built and
>> installed by cabal
>
> We need to fold src/preproc.hs into the main executable (as was done for
> the manpage) and/or replace it with pandoc voodoo inside the main executable.

I have done the preproc part in this patch: It's called darcs
--preprocess-manual <preproc parameters>. This seemed good enough. (It may have
been a better idea to make it a separate patch, dunno.)

Yours,
   Petr.