Subject: bug#8099: LaTeX and automake

From: Ralf Wildenhues <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:43:33 +0100

Hi Reuben,

* Reuben Thomas wrote on Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 03:24:57PM CET:
> Update: I've written to John to ask about copyright assignment, but
> discovered in the mean time that there are one or two other authors to
> talk to. I will see what John says first before considering how to
> proceed.

I'm not sure if I said it before; but I wouldn't be surprised if there
is interest to let latexmk (continue to) exist independently from
Automake.  Not all users of the former are likely to be using the latter
also.  It's not even clear how big the benefit of a merge would be; at
least to me it is not yet.

* Reuben Thomas wrote on Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 03:39:13PM CET:
> By the way, before getting all excited about programming, maybe I
> could just write some additional documentation for automake
> recommending the use of latexmk and giving an example Makefile.am
> fragment?

Not just that.  You (or we) should be thinking hard about desired
semantics first.  And a small part of that is showing how example
rules would look like: both what you'd use now, without automake,
and also what you'd like to be using with automake support, and
also what automake would then generate for you.  Installation and
distribution semantics are next.  The code that comes from this can
then be written as new tests, and the rest as documentation patch.

Thanks,
Ralf