Bug#664517: gnome-doc-utils: removal of mallard.rng makes other packages FTBFS

[Alberto Garcia]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 06:27:39PM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:

> This could be rephrased like that: If you use gnome-doc-utils and
> you run "make check" during build, you need to autoreconf your
> package, right?

Not just autoreconf, you also have to run gnome-doc-prepare.

> What does upstream say to that / recommend?
> Do you maybe have an upstream bug report?

No, I only had time for a short IRC chat, his opinion is that

"it sucks, and it's bitten us in the past. but autotools doesn't
really make this stuff easy"

I haven't looked into the problem much further.

To me it sounds like a compatibility break with previous versions of
gnome-doc-utils, but I'm not familiar with its internals so I'm still
not so sure of any better solution.

Version 0.20.8 has just been published with that fix, btw.

Maybe we can ship the package with the files that are necessary to
prevent the breakage (it might be enough with just mallard.rng, I
haven't checked it). This way packages generated with old versions of
gnome-doc-utils would still work, they would have time to transition
to the new version, and new packages would not use it anyway.

Or we can try to discuss with upstream to see if there's really no
other way to solve this problem.

Berto