Re: advice for pre-generating documentation

[Stefano Lattarini]

At Thursday 11 February 2010, Andreas Jellinghaus <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
Hello Andreas.  I'm by no means an expert on complex Automake usage, but
maybe I can provide a hint or two.
> 
> we generate some docs with doxygen, others with a shell
> script using wget and xslt to download our wiki and
> create local html files from that).
> 
> that mechanism is currently enabled with "--enable-doc",
> off by default as it is time-consuming and usualy not
> wanted.
> 
> the problem I have is this:
> * I want people to checkout svn and compile and test the
>   software without generating documentation.
> * if people want the docs, they should be able to create
>   them too.

> * if I run "make distcheck", I want the existing documentation
>   to be included in the tar.gz file.
Maybe a dist-hook can help here:
 - http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/The-dist-Hook.html
A dist-hook can be especially useful if you don't know in advance the names
of all the files to be included in the distribution tarball, in which case
EXTRA_DIST is useless (and if I recall correctly, Doxygen generates *a lot*
of files when creating HTML output).
> * if I run "make maintainer-clean", I want generate documentation
>   to be removed, so I can diff between a modified checkout and
>   an unmodified svn checkout.
As already pointeided out by Gaetan, writing a `maintainer-clean-local'
target can be useful here; you can find more information at:
 - http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Clean.html
 - http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Extending.html

HTH,
   Stefano