[PPL-devel] Re: debian/control: build-depends

[Roberto Bagnara]

Michael Tautschnig wrote:
>> Also Doxygen
>> is required.  I am adding all of these to the build-dependencies.
>> However, do not expect this to work reliably: the truth is that
>> a very recent version of Doxygen is required in order to build
>> the documentation and the Debian packaging system does not
>> seem to allow specifying this.
>>
> This might also be the soure of my 
> Constraint_System-undocumented-Problem ... But assuming you do not use 
> every new feature being added to doxygen in the future, the time will 
> come where the version provided by Debian is just fine ...

It is not a matter of new features that we need.  The problem has always
been the considerable amount of bugs in all versions of Doxygen and the
fact that new (or even old) bugs (re)appear in new releases.  Not to
criticize Doxygen: it is a very nice tool that suffers a lot from
the lack of regression testing (of course, I have no idea how reasonable
regression testing could be done on a tool whose output are pages of
documentation).

To summarize, I will tell you what I do at release time.  I start
from Doxygen's CVS head and go back a CVS release(*) at a time until
I obtain something that is good enough.
Cheers,

     Roberto

(*) Dimitri commits changes to CVS in chunks.  Usually one per week,
     usually on Sundays.

-- 
Prof. Roberto Bagnara
Computer Science Group
Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy
http://www.cs.unipr.it/~bagnara/
mailto:bagnara at cs.unipr.it