[apparmor] [patches] avoid building tech doc during build

[Steve Beattie]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 03:31:59PM -0800, Steve Beattie wrote:
> Attached are two alternative patches for avoiding the problem of
> building the parser's techdoc during the build, which introduces
> the latex stack as build dependencies for downstreams, and is also
> a source of unrepeatability in the build.
> 
> The first patch adds building the documentation (including man pages)
> to the tarball generation process, and thus includes the generated
> files in the tarball. Assuming the time stamps work out okay (local
> tests showed they did), building the documentation would be (mostly)
> avoided during the build -- the exception to this is the libapparmor
> man pages, as the Makefile to generate its man pages is created
> as part of the configure process, which is not done as part of the
> release process. An additional step that I didn't do here would be to
> remove the pdf from the default build path, to ensure that it doesn't
> get triggered to build.
> 
> The alternative patch removes the techdoc and the steps to build it
> entirely. It has not been updated meaningfully since 2007, and no one
> seems to have time to take on bringing it up to date. Furthermore,
> John has created his own (unfinished) set of documentation as
> {open,libre}office documents in the toplevel documentation directory.
> 
> Either patch would improve the situation for downstreams.

Based on feedback received, I committed the first patch, which keeps
the techdoc, and builds it and most of the man pages during the
release process rather than during the build, to make things easier
for downstream consumption. I also included in the commit the followup
patch to take the techdoc out of the default build path. Local changes
to the man pages will still cause them to be regenerated during the
build, so downstreams can still do that if necessary.

All that said, at this point I consider the techdoc deprecated. I
would like to see it updated to more accurately reflect the current
capabilities of apparmor. And, while latex is a fine documentation
language, if someone wants to update it but would rather work with
a different technology than latex, be it libreoffice, markdown, or
some other tool, I have no problem with that and am willing to help
with such a conversion.

Thanks.

-- 
Steve Beattie
<sbeattie at ubuntu.com>
http://NxNW.org/~steve/
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