[albatross-users] Including EPS files in source tarball

[Fabian Fagerholm]

Hello,

My attempts to make the Albatross documentation build with the
requirements set by the Debian packaging have failed. Albatross is not
at fault; the culprit is Dia, which won't run unless it has a $DISPLAY.
Thus, the Albatross UML diagrams can't be created as part of the build
process.

The Debian package can under no circumstances assume a $DISPLAY is
available. The Debian autobuilders do not provide one, and pbuilder,
which is used to ensure that the packaging works in Debian unstable,
does not provide one. I have tried using Xvfb to work around this, but
it doesn't work with the package build process.

Therefore, I will drop the building of Albatross documentation. I am
considering a separate -doc package in which your pre-packaged
documentation would be debianized.

There is, however, another option. If you would include the EPS files
exported from Dia in the source tarball, all problems would be solved.

I probably don't have to make an argument for why Dia is bad; this has
been expressed already. Perhaps I must convince you that including the
EPS files would be good. My arguments follow.

Including the EPS files in the source tarball would be good because:

      * It benefits users of the Debian package, since building the
        documentation as part of the entire build process ensures the
        documentation corresponds to the Albatross version. The
        introduction of a new Albatross package would see all packages
        updated at once. There is no risk of mistake or delays due to a
        separate source package.
      * It benefits users of the Debian package, since the tests
        performed on the documentation during the build helps ensure
        that the examples in the documentation work with the Python
        version used in Debian.
      * It benefits users who cannot use Dia to build the documentation,
        but who don't want to download the separate documentation.
      * It would benefit those who package Albatross for other systems.

The downside would be a considerably larger tarball. If Dia is ever
fixed, all of this would go away, of course.

What do you think?

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