[OE-core] [PATCH 0/8] support xmlto

[Otavio Salvador]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 6:33 PM, Burton, Ross <ross.burton at intel.com> wrote:
> On 8 July 2014 10:47, Hongxu Jia <hongxu.jia at windriver.com> wrote:
>> The xmlto was shipped from meta-oe, and fixed the defects that
>> 'xmlto/xsltproc stylesheets cannot be found even when they are
>> installed in sysroot'
>>
>> The xmlto required docbook-xml-dtd and docbook-xsl-stylesheets,
>> we refered debian's docbook-xml-dtd and ubuntu config.
>>
>> We also enable xmlto for alsa-utils, xorg-proto-common.inc,
>> xorg-lib-common.inc, xserver-xorg.inc.
>
> Presumably the goal here is to enable documentation generation?  I'd
> say what we want is more complicated than a blanket "--with-xmlto" and
> comes back to the same points I raised when the doxygen patch was
> submitted.
>
> Native packages never need to build documentation, as nobody is going
> to read it.  We've made steps in this direction with the texinfo class
> that stubs makeinfo for native recipes.
>
> Target packages may want documentation, but may not.  A powerul board
> such as a Minnow or Beagle can support development on the target and
> having e.g. the X11 protocol documentation available might be
> convenient.  A board with no UI and 64MB of RAM isn't going to support
> development on the target and every built piece of documentation is
> wasted time.
>
> SDK packages do want documentation.  The ability to ship a SDK with a
> toolchain, libraries, and exactly the correct documentation for the
> libraries is valuable and currently something we can't do.
>
> I'd suggest that we need a global BUILD_DOCUMENTATION variable that
> can be overridden per-class so that e.g. native and target recipes
> don't build documentation but SDK packages do.  Then along with xmlto
> we can add gtk-doc and doxygen, adding the ability to build full API
> documentation for the SDKs.
>
> As such this is definitely a two-part series.  Adding xmlto is useful
> and I'm genuinely happy that someone who wasn't me managed to get
> docbook-xsl working ;) as that's the blocker for gtk-doc support too.
> However rnabling xmlto in some recipes globally isn't the right thing
> to do and will introduce noticeable regressions in build time for many
> classes of users for no reason.

I second all your concerns and also I add that the commit logs were too pour.

I am really not sure about a global setting is the way to go. I'd be
more included to a PACKAGECONFIG like system.

-- 
Otavio Salvador                             O.S. Systems
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