How to handle documentation and move it in the right place.

[Hans Deragon]

Greetings.


  I am trying to jugle with automake and rpmbuild to get an RPM built with the 
documentation in the proper place.  I tried many things, but I never succeded to 
get my documentation installed where I want.  When the documentation is 
installed in the right place using "make install", rpmbuild can't get the 
documentation or complains.

  Anybody has a good receipe for doings this?

I have the following defined:

nobase_pkgdata_DATA = \
  AUTHORS \
  COPYING \
  ChangeLog \
  INSTALL \
  NEWS \
  README \
  doc/apt-build.html \
  doc/apt-build.pdf \
  doc/apt-build.ps \
  doc/apt-build.txt

But this is not great, since "make install" sends this to
/tmp/apt-build/share/apt-build (--prefix==/tmp/apt-build).  Here is the content:

address@hidden ls /tmp/apt-build/share/apt-build
AUTHORS  ChangeLog  COPYING  doc/  INSTALL  NEWS  README

Now, I would like to have everything under the doc/ directory.  It would be more 
clean.  But in the source directory, I cannot move COPYING and all the other 
files into doc/ without having automake complaining.

Also, when I build the RPM, what should I put in %doc?  When I have the 
following declared:

%doc
AUTHORS
COPYING
ChangeLog
INSTALL
NEWS
README
doc/apt-build.html
doc/apt-build.pdf
doc/apt-build.ps
doc/apt-build.txt

I get the following errors:

error: File must begin with "/": AUTHORS
error: File must begin with "/": COPYING
error: File must begin with "/": ChangeLog
error: File must begin with "/": INSTALL
error: File must begin with "/": NEWS
error: File must begin with "/": README
error: File must begin with "/": doc/apt-build.html
error: File must begin with "/": doc/apt-build.pdf
error: File must begin with "/": doc/apt-build.ps
error: File must begin with "/": doc/apt-build.txt

If I hardcode the paths:

%doc
/usr/share/apt-build/AUTHORS
/usr/share/apt-build/COPYING
/usr/share/apt-build/ChangeLog
/usr/share/apt-build/INSTALL
/usr/share/apt-build/NEWS
/usr/share/apt-build/README
/usr/share/apt-build/doc/apt-build.html
/usr/share/apt-build/doc/apt-build.pdf
/usr/share/apt-build/doc/apt-build.ps
/usr/share/apt-build/doc/apt-build.txt

the RPM is built, but the documentation is exactly in these directories, which 
is wrong since it should be under /usr/share/doc/apt-build-1.0.0.  In other 
words, using absolute paths bypass rpmbuilds %doc settings regarding the path 
where the documents should be stored.

This is driving me crazy.  I wish that there was a simple syntaxe like:

AUTHORS => %{_pgkdata}/doc

for Automake and RPM to directly specify without ambiguity where the files 
should be moved.


Best regards,
Hans Deragon
--
Consultant en informatique/Software Consultant
Deragon Informatique inc.     Open source:
http://www.deragon.biz        http://autopoweroff.sourceforge.net
mailto://address@hidden     (Automatically poweroff home servers)