[cups.general] CUPS documentation and web content at the same place

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

On May 4 10:22 Michael Sweet wrote:
> On May 4, 2010, at 8:11 AM, Johannes Meixner wrote:
>> ...
>> This causes an issue when distributing CUPS as RPM packages
>> because in RPM one specifies documentation files explicitely as
>>   %doc /path/to/documentation/cups
>> so that the user can decide not to install the documentation
>> (via RPM's install-option "--excludedocs") if he doesn't need
>> documentation (e.g. on a server machine).
>> ...
>> Therefore I would like to ask if it makes sense to have
>> two configure options, one for the actual CUPS documentation
>> and another one for the CUPS web content like
>>   ./configure --with-docdir=/path/to/documentation/cups \
>>               --with-web-content-dir=/path/to/webcontent/cups
>
> I'm not keen on this approach since it will require substantial
> changes to CUPS to support it.

O.k. - the issue is really not worth such an effort.


> Instead, why not just do:
>    %doc /path/to/webcontent/help
> since all of the online help is stored in the "help" subdirectory?

This could be a possible solution for plain RPM but then
the parent directory /path/to/webcontent must be no longer
one of the well known RPM documentation directories
because the non-help CUPS web content files are
no documentation files.

In this case I would have to do
   ./configure --with-docdir=/non/documentation/directory
where /non/documentation/directory is something like
$(cups-config --datadir) or $(cups-config --serverbin)
i.e.
   ./configure --with-docdir=/usr/share/cups/webcontent
or
   ./configure --with-docdir=/usr/lib/cups/webcontent
depending on whether or not the CUPS web content files
are actually shareable between different machines of possibly
different hardware architecture (e.g. 32-bit versus 64-bit)
but with the same version of CUPS installed according to
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRSHAREARCHITECTUREINDEPENDENTDATA

I think that the CUPS web content files are actually shareable
in this way (I never got a bug report regarding our current
web content location /usr/share/doc/packages/cups)
so that I would prefer
   ./configure --with-docdir=/usr/share/cups/webcontent

But this is contradicting to what "./configure --help" shows:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
   --with-docdir    set path for documentation
--------------------------------------------------------------------

It would be also no longer in compliance to the CUPS upstream
default location of the web content according to
http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/ref-cupsd-conf.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------
The DocumentRoot directive specifies the location
of web content for the HTTP server in CUPS.
....
The default directory is /usr/share/doc/cups.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Furthermore it is questionable if files in /path/to/webcontent/help
are really files which should be packaged in the RPM as %doc
because those files are basically the same as what a program
may output when called as "program --help".
I.e. the files in /path/to/webcontent/help could be considered
as integral built-in help part of the CUPS web server content
but not as some kind of separated/external add-on documentation
where the program works as well without it (so that the add-on
documentation can be easily omitted to be installed).

I think that all what might be changed is only the configure
option name  "--with-docdir" to something which matches
its actual usage e.g. to "--with-web-content-dir".

Unfortunately such a change breaks existing scripts to compile CUPS
so that in the end perhaps only the "./configure --help" output
and the default for --with-docdir should be changed to better
match the actual usage e.g.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--with-docdir  set path for web content [DATAROOTDIR/cups/webcontent]
----------------------------------------------------------------------


Michael,
would you mind if I use now in the Novell/openSUSE CUPS RPMs
   ./configure --with-docdir=%{_datadir}/cups/webcontent
or should I better wait until you changed the CUPS upstream
default location of the web content?

I would prefer not to change it two times - now to
/usr/share/cups/webcontent and later to whatever
CUPS upstream default location.

May I file an enhancement request for CUPS 1.5 regarding the issue?


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
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