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

[Chet Ramey]

On 12/6/15 4:18 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

>>> 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.

Please read what I wrote.  The PDF/PS/dvi files are not installed by any
target.

>> 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.

And now we're back to generating the files.

>> 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.  

Well, it involves generating them, since up through bash-4.3, the standard
distribution does not include them.  Starting with bash-4.4, they'll be in
the distribution, so that will not be a problem.  (If history is any guide,
though, it will be 2-3 years before Debian has cycled to bash-4.4.)

I'm going to assume that even running autoreconf doesn't change enough
files to cause existing targets to be rebuilt when their source doesn't
change (i.e., it's not run with --force).

There are two problems discussed at
> <https://bugs.debian.org/806945>:
> 
>   1. The man2html copy that Bash provides produces non-deterministic
>      output;

Yes, because of a timestamp.  This will not be a problem if the files don't
have to be generated.

How about this:  I will make sure that shipping the generated
documentation will not cause files to be regenerated, and that this will
work whether the build is done in the source directory or not.

> 
>   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.

This is simply false.  You seem to be using generate and install
interchangeably.

See above for the solution to generating these files with `make all'.

> 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.

So installing the html files is a separate issue, unrelated to the issues
raised by the `reproducible builds' folks.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/