Sunday, October 5, 2008

Parallel-Installable Gtk-Docs

I recently release GMime 2.4.0 but missed the fact that the gtk-docs would install into the same location as the old 2.2 docs, namely ${prefix}/share/gtk-doc/html/gmime. Thwe problem is clear, since GMime 2.4 changed API (rather than just extending the 2.0/2.2 API), GMime 2.4 really needs to be fully parallel installable.

Thanks to Gilles Dartiguelongue from the Gentoo community for discovering this and bringing it to my attention.

As I tried to figure out how to accomplish what I needed, I discovered that Gtk-Doc needed some fixes so I did a quick hack and submitted it upstream.

Unfortunately, my original fix was broken in that I didn't realize that a simple version extension to the install directory wouldn't be enough because GNOME's devhelp program expected the .devhelp and .devhelp2 files would be named with the same version extension, or they would not be detected.

After that was pointed out to me, I looked deeper into the problem and discovered it wasn't such a terribly hard fix afterall, just a little shell scripting magic was all that was needed ;-)

Since Stefan Kost (the gtk-doc maintainer) and myself were both interested in such a solution, I figured there must be other library maintainers who would be interested in this and so thought I would blog about it.

For those interested in packaging GMime 2.4.x for the various distros, I'll be releasing a 2.4.2 release in the next day or so (going to wait a little longer just in case anyone finds any other last minute parallel-install bugs in the gmime-2.4.1.1 tarball I put together for testing; it's bad enough that I've already released a gmime-2.4.1 with nothing but parallel install fixes and that 2.4.2 will be more of the same, I'd rather not have to issue a 2.4.3).

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