Ship large amounts of image files?

[John Darrington]

As everyone will have probably noticed, Selma's excellent work
on the GUI documentation includes many (125) screenshots.
So that the documentation can be produced in all the formats that
Texinfo supports, each of this screenshots need to be available
in at least 3 different formats (png, jpg, eps).

Clearly, it's undesireable to have redundant files, when one can be trivially
and automatically converted from the other.  Imagemagick for example has a 
"convert" program which is very easy to use. On the other hand it's undesirable
for builders to be forced to install yet another build tool.

As I see it, we have three options:

1.  Commit all formats to git.
    Pro: Nobody needs conversion tools unless working on documentation.
    Con: Redundant.  Large amounts of data to checkout.  Would very likely
         lead to inconsistent image files in the future.

2.  Commit one format to git, and ship all formats in the tarball.
    Pro: Optimal use of Git.  Packagers need not install conversion tools.
    Con: make dist and/or make -f Smake depends on conversion tool.

3.  Ship one format in the tarball. Conversion done in make
    Pro: Optimal tarball size.
    Con: Anyone building PSPP needs a convertion tool.

I'm still optimistic, that we can automatically capture at least the majority
of the screenshots, which (in the future) would give us another option:

4.  Commit no image files to git.  They would be generated as parts of the build
    process.

Comments?

J'



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