maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

> #At lp:maria
>
>  2706 knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx	2009-05-25
>       Imported freely distributable documentation from upstream MySQL 5.1.34 source tarball.
>       added:

This commit adds documentation files that are included in the MySQL source
tarballs, but which are kept in a separate source code repository than the
main server sources, and hence are currently not available in MariaDB
releases. It includes:

Descriptions on how to install using various methods:

    Docs/INSTALL-BINARY
    INSTALL-SOURCE
    INSTALL-WIN-SOURCE
    support-files/MacOSX/ReadMe.txt

Man pages:

    man/*.[18]

Contents for help tables:

    scripts/fill_help_tables.sql

All of these are distributed under the GPL v2 license as far as I could
determine (and I checked fairly well).

It does _not_ include the MySQL manual (Docs/mysql.info) as that is not
available under a free license (we might be able to distribute itm but not be
allowed to update it with new MariaDB features, so not interesting for us to
include as far as I can see).

This came up under a discussion with Arjen Lentz about making binary packages
for MariaDB. At MySQL they have special scripts to pull these files from
external sources, but I think it is much better to maintain them in the main
source repository for a number of reasons.

So I would suggest to merge this into lp:maria. However, it is something to
warrant discussion first whether we want to do this, of course.

Tecknically, to merge files from newer MySQL releases I created a branch on
Launchpad:

    lp:~maria-captains/maria/mysql-docs-merge-base

To merge files from MySQL 5.1.35 (when it is released), would be a matter of
doing this:

T=../mysql-5.1.35 ; for i in Docs/INSTALL-BINARY INSTALL-SOURCE INSTALL-WIN-SOURCE support-files/MacOSX/ReadMe.txt scripts/fill_help_tables.sql $(cd "$T" && find man -type f | grep '\.[0-9]$' | grep -v '^man/ndb_' | grep -v '^man/mysqlman.1$') ; do cp "$T/$i" $i; bzr add $i ; done

Plus commit and push to the lp:~maria-captains/maria/mysql-docs-merge-base
branch. Then the new files can be pulled into lp:maria from this branch. This
procedure would work for any number of MySQL releases.

If we decide to do this, we should of course start maintaining our own
modifications to the files in the MariaDB source tree (especially as Arjen
tells me the information is partly out of date). The above merge procedure
will be able to handle merging own modifications with those done by Sun/MySQL
upstream. I think there is a good chance that we could enlist the help from
someone in community to help maintaining such documentation (I am thinking in
particular of the man pages and the installation instructions).

Any opinions? Should I move forward with this?

 - Kristian.