src/docs/design and make distcheck

[Christian Stimming]

Am Samstag, 26. November 2011, 16:36:16 schrieb John Ralls:
> The Makefile in src/docs/design requires texi2dvi, which in turn depends on
> TeX. Make distcheck insists on actually building src/docs/design.
> 
> Does that even make sense? Setting aside the fact that those design
> documents are horribly out of date (the last substantive change was 7 years
> ago), it's arguable that we should just delete the whole thing (Christian
> added a warning about their being obsolete 4 years ago). But it seems
> really dumb to have an enormous dependency (MacTeX is a 1.8 GB download) to
> make a PDF of a wrong document.

We should get rid of the dependency here for sure.

(By the way, I'm puzzled how texinfo can require TeX. Can't we just disable 
dvi/pdf/ps output and stick to "info" output, thereby avoiding TeX?)

But the text itself is IMHO not so useless at all. The two larger documents 
about "engine" and "component manager" still do make some sense. They're not 
completely accurate anymore and the described structure is surely not what 
we're aiming at *today*, but they still describe 75% correctly the way how the 
larger part of the "engine" objects work and also how the "component manager" 
should work. Again, especially the "component manager" would be implemented 
completely differently today, as I'm rather sure there should be a good 
library solution in glib or gtk by now, but the text document still describes 
validly what the existing code is supposed to do.

Maybe we can just put the text output of the "engine" and "component manager" 
files somewhere else, and remove the "info" document?

But when talking about "make dist", we can also remove them from the tarball 
and still keep them in SVN.

Regards,

Christian