Get doxypress in standard packages for Linux distros (esp Ubuntu)

[tonyelewis]

I'm interested enough in Doxypress to try it out if I can install it as a standard Ubuntu package but not enough to build it myself. I suspect there are many others like me so I think you'll get much better adoption if you can to get Doxypress in standard Linux distro packages and then publicise that fact.

Thanks.

[agserm]

We are in complete agreement with your request and this is definitely a task we are working on. Thank you for your feedback and for letting us know that we are reading the priorities of our potential users correctly.

[tonyelewis]

Thanks.

[davidchisnall]

It would help hugely if the pre-built binaries were packages, even if they aren't in a package repo. For example, the FreeBSD one seems to depend on other CopperSpice things, but just downloading the release of that into the same directory then leads to a load of other missing libraries. If these were shipped as .pkg files, then they could depend on the ones from upstream package repo and I could just pkg add them. The same applies to .deb packages on Debian / Ubuntu.

It looks as if CopperSpice is packaged for FreeBSD, but the headers from that release contain bugs that are triggered by building doxypress, so I can't build it from source. So far, I have tried and failed to install from source or from your pre-built binaries on both FreeBSD and Ubuntu. This issue appears to have been open now for six years. I can't even evaluate whether doxypress meets our requirements unless I can install it and the demo site looks like it is exactly what we want.

[bgeller]

We do agree that packaging is a terrific idea and we are looking for contributors in this area.

For right now we want to find out what is going on with your set up. Did you download the pre-built version of DoxyPress from our github or download page? If so, there should not be any missing CS dependencies. Can you tell us what errors you received and what is missing? My initial hunch is that you might be missing some FreeBSD packages like XCB.

When building DP from source you will need to install the packages listed in our CS Overview Documentation.

https://www.copperspice.com/docs/cs_overview/requirements-unix.html#freebsd-cs-dev

The maintainer for the FreeBSD packages made multiple changes to our build files without consulting us. We have heard from other FreeBSD users about issues with his files and hopefully he will reach out to us at some point. It is likely he did not understand some of the build and deployment decisions our team made and thought changing them would be ok.

We will do everything we can to help you get DoxyPress running on FreeBSD and/or Ubuntu.

[davidchisnall]

For right now we want to find out what is going on with your set up. Did you download the pre-built version of DoxyPress from our github or download page?

I downloaded both from your download page.

If so, there should not be any missing CS dependencies. Can you tell us what errors you received and what is missing? My initial hunch is that you might be missing some FreeBSD packages like XCB.

There weren't CS dependencies missing, but there were dependencies on things like XCB (why does a headless tool depend on an X11 client library?). A bunch of the libraries have had version bumps in packages since they were released, so I'm not sure whether installing the packages would help, but it was a huge list of dependencies on the web site.

The maintainer for the FreeBSD packages made multiple changes to our build files without consulting us. We have heard from other FreeBSD users about issues with his files and hopefully he will reach out to us at some point. It is likely he did not understand some of the build and deployment decisions our team made and thought changing them would be ok.

Note that anyone can either contribute packages (they need to be reviewed and committed by a ports committer, but generally commit bits are handed out to people doing the work) or maintain an overlay ports set. The latter would mean that, at least, I could just point Poudriere at it and build a consistent package set. I don't think the problem was with his changes though, it was an error in one of the headers (I've forgotten which one, sorry), which a quick check in your repo showed was fixed upstream, but made it into the previous release. If you wanted to maintain the CS / DoxyPress ports, I'd be very happy to help you prepare a patch and get it properly reviewed.

Our CI machines run Ubuntu, so that's the highest priority for me (I use FreeBSD on my dev system, but I could easily generate docs on an Ubuntu instance). The easiest thing there is to have a repo that I can just add to apt and that pulls in the dependencies from the main repos.

Requiring users to manually install a load of dependencies is awkward for two reasons:

• If they change, users need to manually update the list. This includes version-specific changes.
• Package tools track them as manually installed and so autoremove can't clean them up if you want to uninstall DoxyPress.

[bgeller]

There are actually two programs, DoxyPress and DoxyPressApp.

DoxyPress is the application which generates the documentation output, it is a command line program and does not require XCB or an X server. This executable only links with CsCore and CsXml.

DoxyPressApp is a GUI application used to create the json project file. Using this program is optional however it is a very convenient way to update the project file. If you would prefer editing the json file can be done from any editor. There is an option in DoxyPressApp to generate the documentation output. This step starts a process to launch DoxyPress.

Since there are over 300 options most users prefer to use DoxyPressApp, at least in the beginning until the json project file is configured.

We do understand the advantage of a package.

The version numbers listed in our docs for the unix packages are the minimum required. We have not seen issues with using newer versions. For many of our supported platforms we have a package install command. Did you find the apt-get for Ubuntu and give it a try? Again, you will only need this if you want to build from source or run the GUI application DoxyPressApp.

If you would like us to update the CS Overview docs for FreeBSD to include the install command information we are happy to do that.

Barbara