FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT schemamania.org>]

This message regards the intended location of the installed documentation,
and how (and where) it it generated.  

I'm working on making "make install" install the documentation.  

The target directories:

UG:             PREFIX/share/doc/freetds/userguide/
reference:      PREFIX/share/doc/freetds/reference/html/

(man pages are installed in the canonical place.)

Actually, "PREFIX/share" is only the default; it can be adjusted with
"./configure --datadir=your/place".  

Currently, we have a complicated set of scripts that install the
documentation.  I discovered an automake variable "dist_data_DATA" that
does just what we want, meaning we can discard the scripts.  

The dist_data_DATA target copies files (or directories) to PREFIX/share. 
All we do is specify the names of the directories, and it does the rest. 
But, there's a restriction: it's pretty dumb.  There's no opportunity to
adjust the directory names.  To use it, the build tree must reflect the
install tree.  

Currently, the build tree is something like this:

        userguide/
        reference/html/

To use dist_data_DATA we need it to look like this:

        doc/freetds/userguide/
        doc/freetds/reference/html/

Unless someone objects, I'm going to:

1.  adjust doc/Makefile.am to change the build tree, such that we can use 
dist_data_DATA.  

2.  stop tar-ing the documentation directories in snapshots (and other
distributions).  

About the dependencies on DocBook/Doxygen.  For systems without these
tools, I'll generate a stub output, a simple HTML document with a link to
the website.  That will allow CVS users to build the libraries and install
without error (and also without documentation, but that can't be helped). 
Snapshot users will be unaffected; the snapshot includes pre-built
documentation, and the generated Makefile should never be tempted to
recreate it.  In any case, no stub will overwrite anything.  

--jkl