[Numpy-discussion] numpy docs dependency problem in Ubuntu

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Fri Feb 11 10:40:57 EST 2011


On Feb 10, 2011, at 11:26 PM, Pauli Virtanen wrote:

>Without matplotlib, you won't get any graphs in the documentation.
>Ubuntu users will then miss out e.g. on illustrations of various
>probability distributions. The figures are not absolutely necessary, but
>I wouldn't like to see that to happen just because of a packaging issue.

Agreed that it's not ideal.  We've landed my proposed workaround in Natty
today, so at least folks will get some documentation.  I would definitely like
to find a better long-term solution.

>How about splitting off the Numpy documentation to a separate source
>package? That wouldn't need to get into main, as it's of use only to
>developers.

I like this the best, because it would allow us to resync with Debian, which
AFAICT does not have the same cross-archive problem that Ubuntu has.  (And
which is why Ubuntu's workaround is not appropriate for Debian.)

The ideal way to deal with this would be separate upstream (i.e. you guys :)
tarball releases for the code and documentation.  We'd then take those and
split our current single source package into to separate source packages, with
the code one going into main and the documentation one going into universe.
For Debian, we'd simply take those two separate source packages and split the
binary packages among them as appropriate.

>Or, using prebuilt HTML documentation supplied by upstream or pre-built
>by Ubuntu devs?

Neither will be acceptable I think.  Prebuilt by upstream won't fly for Debian
because they'd want the source and build process, and I don't see a feasible
way for them to be prebuilt by Ubuntu that's any different than the current
build process (which fails because of the cross-archive issue).

Do you think it would be feasible for numpy to produce two tarballs - one with
just the code and the other with just the docs?

Note that one of my other proposed workarounds was very similar to this
(i.e. two separate source packages), but just that we'd use the same
all-encompassing tarball for both.  The disadvantage of that is that it
diverges from Debian, which I'd like to avoid if at all possible.  A split
tarball approach from upstream would be easier to get into Debian, and thus
keep us in sync.

-Barry

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