[Aptitude-devel] make distcheck fails: Installed documentation not removed

[Daniel Burrows]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 12:19:43PM +0200, Jens Seidel <jensseidel at users.sf.net> was heard to say:
> I noticed that "make distcheck" fails for the current aptitude snapshot.
> As it was recently released this is probably true for the last version as
> well.
> 
> Daniel, please start this command before each release.

  I do.  There's a spurious failure in the last step because "make uninstall"
doesn't work.  "make uninstall" is a hack at best and isn't supported by the
aptitude codebase, so it's not really surprising that this test fails, but
the distributed source does build and pass its self-checks.

  How would you suggest fixing this?  Running "rm -r" seems like it
stands a decent chance of blowing up files the user actually wants; I
suppose that we could iterate over the files that get recursively copied
into the doc directory and remove them.

  e.g.,

    for x in output-html/*.html; do
      rm $(DESTDIR)$(docdir)/html/en/$$(basename $$x)
    done

  That seems safe enough.

> Another minor issue (which could be related): I do not like the last
> line of autogen.sh which calls ./configure in the source directory.
> I prefer to build aptitude in a separate build directory:
> 
> mkdir build
> cd build
> ../configure
> 
> Could you please remove this ./configure call or do you have good
> reasons to keep it?

  Sure, it's just there to decrease the number of steps I have to do on
a fresh checkout and the number of steps I have to document for users.
It looks like I'm already saying to run "configure" after autogen on the
Web site, though (oops), so only the DocBook documentation needs to
change.

  Daniel