Re: [PATCH 0/5] Make PDF builds work again

[Markus Heiser]

> Am 05.07.2017 um 23:22 schrieb Jim Davis <jim.epost@xxxxxxxxx>:
> 
> On Mon, Jul 3, 2017 at 5:44 AM, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Mon, 3 Jul 2017 10:25:38 +0200
>> Daniel Vetter <daniel@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>>> Only now stumbled over the full thread, but the drm patch is already
>>> queued up for at least 4.13 (Dave was out and all that). I guess we could
>>> try to cherry-pick through stable.
>> 
>> I kind of gave up on the 4.12 goal, at least for now.  The number of
>> complaints has not been huge - I suspect you're far from the only one who
>> is not too worried about building PDFs...:)
> 
> If fixing pdf (and ps) builds isn't worth the bother -- which I
> wouldn't debate -- then it's best to just drop those build targets.
> The only worrisome thing I see here is having build targets carried
> from release to release that don't work.

my 5cent:

we have to communicate that PDF build is in a beta stage (for a long
time).

Sphinx-doc's PDF chain was not well maintained for a long time. With
newer versions (started with 1.5 and continued in 1.6) it becomes
better and better. This gives me some hope that there comes a day
where building PDFs is robust enough to use in automatic builds.

As long as we try to support various version of Sphinx shipped by
various distros and at the same time make/need deep (LaTeX)
adjustments, we will find those discussions on the ML.

If you are doubtful about my assessment, compare Sphinx's 
TeX stuff from master 

https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/tree/master/sphinx/texinputs

with e.g. 1.4.9 tag

https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/tree/1.4.9/sphinx/texinputs

-- Markus --