Re: Installation of PDF/PS/DVI and HTML files

[Ludovic Courtès]

Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> skribis:

> On 12/4/15 4:24 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> skribis:
>> 
>>> On Thu, Dec 03, 2015 at 01:08:13PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>>>> Given that the GCS suggests installing only the Info version of the
>>>> manual by default (info "(standards) Standard Targets")
>>>
>>>> What do you think?
>>>
>>> I think that's a stupid suggestion.  The de facto standard for "make"
>>> followed "make install" on a Unix-like system is to install man pages.
>>> If there's an info page, I have no objection to installing that as well,
>>> but to omit the standard man pages by default is ridiculous.
>> 
>> Agreed; apologies for being unclear.
>> 
>> As Mathieu wrote, I am of course fine installing man and Info manuals by
>> default, like GNU packages generally do.
>> 
>> The suggestion I make is to not install PDF/PS/DVI and HTML files by
>> default.  
>
> Again, only the HTML files are installed by `make install'.  The sticking
> point here appears to be installing the HTML files,

Right, HTML and PDF/PS/DVI.

> which you can suppress by running `make install' with htmldir set to
> the empty string.

I guess that would work, indeed.

>> This would comply with the GCS and user expectations, and also
>> sidestep the bit-for-bit reproducibility issues that generating those
>> PDF/PS/DVI/HTML files entails.
>
> So the problem is once again the build and not the install?  Since the
> build version appears in the version string, and that changes each time
> the binary is rebuilt, bit-by-bit reproducibility is not going to be
> generally possible.

The broader context is that Debian has a policy of rebootstrapping
packages; that is, even if there’s a ‘make dist’-produced tarball, they
will run ‘autoreconf’ et al.

In the case of Bash, that entails a rebuild of the HTML and PDF/PS/DVI
files.  There are two problems discussed at
<https://bugs.debian.org/806945>:

  1. The man2html copy that Bash provides produces non-deterministic
     output;

  2. DVI/PS/PDF generation is not deterministic; this is not a
     Bash-specific issue, but the fact that Bash tries to install these
     files by default make the issue visible to Debian.

While discussing it with Akira and others, it occurred to me that Bash
shouldn’t be installing HTML/PDF/PS/DVI by default, at least per my
understanding of the GCS and its implementation in Automake, hence my
proposal.

I hope this clarifies the context.

Thanks,
Ludo’.