Re: [gentoo-dev] Should Sphinx really depends on PYTHON_COMPAT/PYTHON_USEDEP for `dev-python/*` ebuilds?

[Michał Górny]

On śro, 2017-05-17 at 21:44 -0700, Daniel Campbell wrote:
> On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 09:32:46AM +0200, Michał Górny wrote:
> > On pią, 2017-05-12 at 17:42 -0700, Daniel Campbell wrote:
> > > On 05/11/2017 12:51 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
> > > > In fact, I'm personally leaning towards not building docs at all
> > > > in ebuilds. It's practically a wasted effort since most of the time
> > > > users read docs online anyway.
> > >
> > > I believe that's a little myopic; a user (or even developer) may not
> > > have Internet access all the time, or may not have it in their primary
> > > development environment. Having a copy of the docs locally (the entire
> > > point of USE="doc") is super valuable to have when you're away from the
> > > network. I'm sure I'm not alone as one of the people who uses the flag
> > > and appreciates the work that goes into making sure said flag works.
> > >
> > > Sure, we could yank out every single USE="doc", but then we lose a nice
> > > feature of the tree and users are back to either (a) trawling the Web to
> > > find the project site, then hope they have docs in a separate download,
> > > or (b) we end up with foo+1 packages, one extra for any package that has
> > > documentation. Neither are particularly good solutions; Debian has done
> > > the latter and it results in a huge number of packages for little gain.
> >
> > The Python team mostly focuses on providing packages for dependencies of
> > other Gentoo packages, not direct Python development. We do not have
> > the manpower to go above that.
> >
> > --
> > Best regards,
> > Michał Górny
>
> Ah, well that at least explains why you're not interested in it.
> Dependency management alone can be tough; I've not noticed any Python
> issues, so it seems like you guys do well. :) If you don't mind me
> asking, what would it take to solve the USE="doc" issue to the Python
> team's standard? I have some personal interest in Python and wouldn't
> mind adding 'doc' support for Python packages that users request docs
> for.
>
> Maybe others are willing to join me on this. Is that something we can
> make happen without getting in anyone's hair?
>

For a start, it'd be nice to figure all the stuff out in detail,
and document it -- when USEDEP is needed, not needed, when we need
something else (like the plugin case). Once that is done, it's just
a matter of checking and fixing existing packages, and being patient
with devs doing the same mistakes again ;-).

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny