Bug 431599

First off, thanks for shipping Lout in Fedora.


Could you please update it to the latest upstream version?  Fedora has
been shipping lout-3.30 for the past two and a half years.  The latest
upstream version is lout-3.36.tar.gz, made available on the Lout
author's FTP site on Jul 27, 2007:

  ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/
  ftp://ftp.it.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/

Compared to the version shipped in F8, the latest Lout has six minor
releases' worth of bugfixes.

Another problem with the current Fedora RPM is that it ships an
ancient copy of the Lout User Guide.  The User Guide is even older
than the lout executable.  Lout 3.30 was released on Aug 24, 2005, but
the User Guide included in lout-3.30-7.fc8.src.rpm is for Lout 3.24
released on Oct 8, 2000.



The attached spec file is based on lout-3.30-7.fc8.src.rpm.  I made
the following changes:


 1. Bumped the version number from 3.30 to 3.36.

 2. Changed the URL from
       http://lout.sourceforge.net/
    to
       ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/

    The Sourceforce project is merely a mirror of Jeff Kingston's FTP
    directory.

 3. Reworked the patch file substantially.  The new patchfile only
    modifies two lines of the original makefile.

 4. I added a few additional steps to the build section to generate
    documentation.  The Lout source tarball ships lout-formatted
    sources for the following four documents:

     (a) The Design and Implementation of the Lout Document Formatting
         Language

     (b) A Practical Introduction to the Lout Document Formatting
         System

     (c) A User's Guide to the Lout Document Formatting System

     (d) An Expert's Guide to the Lout Document Formatting System

    In addition to the plain-text lout source files for these docs,
    the tarball also includes prebuilt Postcript versions of (a), (b),
    and (d).  All three of these are named outfile.ps.

    The Postscript version of the User Guide is not included in the
    main tarball but is available as a separate gzipped Postscript
    file both from Jeff's FTP site and from the Sourceforge mirror
    thereof:

      http://sourceforge.net/projects/lout

    However, since these Postscript files can be generated by lout
    itself from the plain-text files included in the tarball, I have
    added the necessary logic to the spec file to produce PDF
    versions.  The steps are:

       (i) Build lout.  (We need this regardless.)

      (ii) Use the freshly built lout to generate Postscript versions.

     (iii) Use Ghostscript's /usr/bin/ps2pdf14 to convert Postscript
           versions into more compact PDF versions.

 5. My decision to replace prebuilt Postscript files with freshly
    generated PDFs introduced a build dependency on ghostscript.

 6. I removed the build dependency on zlib.

    The story here is that, in theory, Lout is capabable of rendering
    lout-formatted text files into three outputs:

      (a) "typeset" plain text;

      (b) Postscript

      (c) PDF

    Lout generates PDF by emitting PDF code directly.  However, as
    Lout's READMEPDF tells us, the PDF backend is incomplete.  Jeff
    Kingston has no intention of bringing it on par with the
    Postscript backend.  In fact, if you try to render Lout's own
    documentation in PDF using lout's -PDF option, you'll find that it
    doesn't work.

    So, since PDF generation does not work, it seems silly to provide
    non-working *compressed* PDF generation capability by linking
    (dynamically) against zlib.

    For Windows users, disabling PDF compression may be viewed as a
    loss of functionality.  For Fedora users, no such loss occurs.  If
    you need PDF output, you can generate Postscript first and then
    convert it to PDF using Ghostscript.


Size-wise, things have changed as follows.

Old RPM:

  1.9M    lout-3.30.tar.gz
  2.5M    lout-3.30-7.fc8.src.rpm
  2.9M    lout-3.30-7.fc8.x86_64.rpm

New RPM:

  2.1M    lout-3.36.tar.gz
  2.1M    lout-3.36-1.fc7.src.rpm
  3.3M    lout-3.36-1.fc7.x86_64.rpm