Thomas Heller writes:
Now that I can build the docs on starship (thanks, Greg!) it's not needed anymore to do it under Windows, but for the archives here are my experiences:
I appreciate your taking the time!
Doing 'nmake pdf' (this is the MSVC6 make utility) in the src/Doc directory worked, it created the pdf docs with MikTeX I had installed. Maybe I had to trivially edit the Makefile (replace 'cp' with 'copy' and such) before.
Most of the "cp" commands were removed as mkhowto became more capable, are were replaced by calls to shutil.copyfile(). There are still a few "cp" commands in the Makefile, though, and the "clean" target and friends still us "rm".
It doesn't work anymore with the recent checkins to the Makefile it didn't work anymore, although installing the Mingw32 gnumake helped.
That's expected, since it now uses the GNU-ish $(shell ...) syntax to call an external script from Doc/tools/. Removing this would require even more painful gyrations to maintain the same functionality, or would require that Python version numbers once more appear in the documentation source tree.
Then I tried to bring 'make html' to work, installed latex2html (I have Perl already), but this always complained about pnmtopng missing (or something like that). And the make failed with an error such as 'image format unsupported'. Well, I tried to find and install native windows pnm2png and png2pnm tools, had to replace incompatible zlib.dll and so on. It didn't work, instead it broke my ssh and maybe other stuff.
That's painful. netpbm is a documented requirement for LaTeX2HTML, but is a pain. I had to install that from source under Cygwin.
At this point I gave up, removed the software, and be happy that I managed to get my ssh working again.
That certainly sounds like a pain. I'll think about what I can do to make it easier, but I don't think it can take a high priority. I'm glad you got it working on Starship. -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org> PythonLabs at Zope Corporation