[albatross-users] Re: Debian package of Albatross

[Fabian Fagerholm]

On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 03:30, Dave Cole wrote:
> When I first used the Python documentation tools I tried to extract
> the files that we needed from the distribution.  After days of
> frustration I decided to just use them from the unpacked distribution
> directory.

After days of frustration, I managed to figure out exactly which files
were needed from the Python Doc/ directory. No, really, I just went
through each and every file one by one, renamed it to <filename>.REMOVE
and ran the build. If it failed, I would know that that file was needed.
Afterwards, I just removed *.REMOVE and voila...

> It would be a big help if there was a Debian package for
> the cools tools and files in the Python Doc/ directory.

I will take a look at this, time permitting.

> I suppose it is mostly dumb luck and persistence that has ended up
> with a combination of tools that seem to produce the right result.
> This is what dpkg tells me I am using:
> 
> ii  dia            0.88.1-3       Diagram editor
> ii  dia-common     0.88.1-3       Diagram editor (common files)
> ii  latex2html     2000-beta1-6   LaTeX to HTML translator.

I just noticed my pdf and ps versions of the docs are using different
fonts than the ones you are generating. I'm almost certain that this is
due to some font not being installed on my system. It has to be LaTeX
-related, but I really don't know where to look. Perhaps you could mail
me (privately, to reduce list clutter) the output of
        apt-cache search font | awk '{print $1}' | xargs dpkg --list
or better, the name of the missing package, should you happen to have a
vivid mental picture of it ;)

> Later versions of dia have changed the font handling in a way that
> causes all of the diagrams to break.  Hopefully this will be addressed
> in subsequent releases so we can stop using back releases.  If not we
> may have to change our diagram tool.

My packages build-depend on dia (>= 0.88.1). The font issue is related
to the use of GTK2, and is documented (/usr/share/doc/dia-common/NEWS.gz
on Debian systems):

...
dia-0.91-pre1: 31-Jan-2003
 
* Dia now uses Gtk2 which makes it look much prettier (menu
  icons, scrolling menus, less flicker, better international
  text support, ...)
* Dia tries to follow the Gnome User Interface Guidelines which
  should make it more consistent with the Gnome2 desktop
* Requires libgtk2.x instead of libgtk1.2. FIXME:
  document exactly what we need (do it in INSTALL too)
* Relies on FreeType (pangoft2) for all Unix-side text handling.
* Since text handling is totally changed, old diagrams will have
  different text sizes.
...

The diagrams are a little bit different with 0.91 and later versions,
mainly the fonts are smaller and hence there's a lot less white space.
Are you seeing the same phenomenon or do you see other breakage?

Since there's a difference in output between 0.88 and >=0.91, and since
I don't think the dia authors are going to bend over backwards to fix
this, I'm going to build-depend on >=0.91 and adjust the diagrams. Would
it be fine with you if I contributed the adjusted diagrams?

-- 
Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe at paniq.net>
paniq.net