John, Geert, Adrien, David Thanks for all the prespectives. I will attempt a restructure of the Building Gnucash page and its derivatives, trying to push as much information back to the generic Linux level as I can from the BuildingUbuntu 16.04 pages. I have no experience of building on Windows or MacOS X so I will definitely leave that to someone else. I'll start with Geert's comments as an overall plan and try to address the rest of your comments. I can set VMs up for the other distros so I can check them out a bit better
With the dependencies I compiled as complete a list as I was able to from my own experience and other users experiences when a lot of people were building v3.0-3.2 as it wasn't available from the distros. . I had a clean Linux Mint install at the time I did that so I captured a few that are usually already installed once you get a bit of other software on board. Some distros do seem to use slightly different names for some libraries and headers so perhaps a warning to check your own distros naming using the equivalent of apt-cache search. I'll do as much as I can from the online documentation for the other distros. I I'll have a closer look and if I can get away perhaps with a subsitute "dnf" and "yum"and "apt" for apt-get as a note along the lines if compiling on xxx subsitute yyy for apt-get in the following. I was reluctant originally to touch the Fedora and Gentoo sections as I hadn't had any experience of them. It would appear the major difference is likely to be the name of the package manager on the various distros. I appreciate there are sometimes also slight differences in the interpretation of the Linux File Heirarchy as well. I'll come back when I've done a restructure and get everyone to check it out David Cousens On Wed, 2018-09-19 at 10:34 +0200, Geert Janssens wrote: > Op dinsdag 18 september 2018 10:19:02 CEST schreef David Cousens: > > John, David, Frank > > > > I wonder at the value of the Build Tools page as a separate orphan entity > > given the more detailed instructions given in the Building Gnucash page. > > There is a fairly good example of dupllcation with it and the following for > > the Gnucash progarm build. > > > > https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Building > > > > and the breakout from it for recent Ubuntu versions > > > > https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/BuildUbuntu16.04 > > > > The main building page is a massive tome. I did start breaking out some > > parts of it into smaller logical chunks when I updated the BuildUbuntu16.04 > > ( which covers 16.04, 18.04 and Linux MInt 18 and 19 in effect.). The Build > > Tools page may be a logical breakout from there with some of the detail in > > the first page cut into it. There is also a short summary recipe for > > building the Docs at the end of the BuildUbuntu16.04 page which lacks detail > > but does work on Ubuntu and most linux distros. It has no details about the > > dependencies in it though. > > > > Would a page on building the docs be better as a breakout from the main > > building Gnucash page perhaps with a shared section on the build tools > > referenced from both. For build instructions I ususaly find the recipe the > > most useful bit with explantions of the specific tools as breakouts. If you > > need the information and background you can follow the links. If you only do > > a build occasionally you follow the recipe. I.e only read the manual when > > you have to. > > > > I wrote my previous mail before looking at the wiki pages you mentioned and I > agree the current structuring is not guiding the reader to a successful build > in the most efficient way. > > The page could be restructured to be more recipe like with links to pages/ > sections with more details. > > The general structure of the general instructions is good, but I would not > differentiate between general and distro specific variants. Building on > Windows and OS X do merit a separate mention as their build instructions are > very different. For linux distros as written before the only difference is > how > to get the necessary dependencies set up. It would make sense to add a > section > for this right before getting the gnucash sources. > > And as I suggested, the info should be very short on the main building page, > with a link to a more detailed page specifically about setting up > dependencies > per distro or distro group. > > The configuring gnucash section could be reduced to indicating what to do for > gnucash 2.6.x and what to do for gnucash 3.x by default. More details on > configuration options could go to a more detailed page on configuring gnucash. > > In my opinion the mention of the compiler is not relevant here. If it should > be mentioned it should be in the section or details on setting up > dependencies. > > All the sections under OS/Distro specific information (other than the two > links to OS X and Windows should IMO be removed from this page. The details > of > setting up dependencies can be grouped on the new page for this, the build > instructions themselves are identical for all distros. Oh and anything that's > valid only for obsolete distros should be removed completely. The oldest > supported Ubuntu distro is 14.04 LTS, for Fedora that's 27. I would not > mention distro releases unless it's necessary to differentiate. In that case > I > would write the default instructions for the current distro (omitting distro > release info) and exceptional instructions for the older distro(s) (adding > for > which distro this matters). That will make it easier to maintain the > documentation in the future: > - if nothing changes when a new disto release comes out, documentation > doesn't > need to be updated > - if a distro becomes obsolete, it's easy to find and remove all info that's > no longer relevant. > > Geert > > _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel