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Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Platform docs
From: Graham Leggett <minfrin@sharp.fm>
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Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:24:38 +0200
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To: dev@httpd.apache.org

On 20 Feb 2012, at 5:16 PM, Daniel Ruggeri wrote:

> Agreed - the wiki is the place to create these types of docs and let
> packagers and maintainers tweak/enhance them until maturity. I've been
> building on AIX for years and was pleased to learn something new from
> Eric's article you mentioned. Also, I think the wiki is the place to =
use
> since there are many ways to skin a cat (produce a build, in this =
case)
> with some ways working/fitting your environment better than others. =
This
> could lead to a lot of suggestions or documentation that might not fit
> in the `official' docs.

We've been shipping build and packaging scripts and the like for =
Windows, Solaris and RPM based systems for a number of years in our =
source tree, and the stuff in the source tree should ideally be =
documented in our formal documentation tree.

Sure, extra knowledge or external packaging variations could be captured =
on a wiki, but it we ship something, we should document it too.

> Do we want to come up with a wishlist to frame a skeleton for build
> documentation? I would expect a generic area of documentation for =
stuff
> like "how to compile with ldaps support" versus "how to get the
> configure script on AIX to ultimately link libldap properly".
>=20
> Suffice to say I learned a lot of stuff through trial and error while
> packaging over the years - it wouldn't take much arm twisting for me =
to
> spread that knowledge. My question is whether or not there is an
> audience to make the effort worthwhile.

That kind of stuff lives below here:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/platform/

The audience for this stuff is anyone who wants to properly deploy httpd =
onto a box in a sensible, manageable state. While some people still =
build from source to a custom target directory, this group is growing =
less and less as OSes come with ever more sensible packaging options.

Regards,
Graham
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