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
Created attachment 294038 [details] updated spec file
Created attachment 294039 [details] a two-line patch file against Lout's makefile This goes with the above spec file.
Wow, thanks for the great work here! I've integrated it into CVS, and built for F-7, F-8, devel, and EL-5 (EL-4 failed, but it is so ancient, I'm not sure it is worth fixing at this point).
lout-3.36-1.fc7 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 7
lout-3.36-1.fc8 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 8
lout-3.36-1.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update lout'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F7/FEDORA-2008-1858
lout-3.36-1.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
lout-3.36-1.fc7 has been pushed to the Fedora 7 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.