INSTALL requirements, man page about watchman

[Envek]

FYI, I'm successfully packaged watchman with fpm (it's awesome):

gem install fpm
git clone https://github.com/facebook/watchman.git
cd watchman
git checkout v4.1.0
sudo apt-get install python-dev
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
mkdir dist
make install DESTDIR=./dist
fpm -s dir -t deb -n watchman -C ./dist -v 4.1.0 .

And I got deb file that is ready to install:

sudo dpkg -i watchman_4.1.0_amd64.deb

[Daniel15]

Thanks @Envek! fpm does look pretty useful, and your steps worked perfectly for me (except I swapped 4.1.0 for 4.5.0, the latest version right now). fpm reminds me of checkinstall except more flexible.

[wez]

You need autotools. The build instructions are in the readme.
An optional but recommended dependency is libpcre.
See configure --help for the complete set of options.

I'm not going to create a man page as I prefer to maintain the readme file in markdown format.

I would be happy to accept a build patch to translate the markdown into a man page.

[sspreitzer]

Hi Wez

Thank you for your answer.
Do you think it would make sense to document inside the watchman README which required and optional build dependencies exist? Could you add such, please?
While technically feasable, the README.mk would not align to what is a fashioned man page.
(http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-creating-a-manpage/)
Is there any way one could create such document for watchman?

PS.: Debian packaging bug is https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=740691

Thank you and kind regards
Sascha

[wez]

Hi Sascha,

My perspective on being the upstream of various distributions is that I can't possibly track every distribution, its package names and versions--I simply don't have the bandwidth to try to keep up to date with so many different platforms, and if I tried, I would likely fall behind and the project would be worse off than if it was obvious that folks should just build from the upstream source.

I am happy to coordinate with folks, such as yourself, that wish to act as maintainers for specific distributions. The way this works best for everyone is if the distribution maintainer does the legwork to figure out specifics for a distribution; any issues can be raised here in the issue tracker and we'll triage and make accommodations for reasonable adjustments to make things easier to package and distribute.

I see this as a two-way relationship; I'll commit to helping a distro maintainer if that maintainer makes a commitment to keeping our project up to date on that distribution.

I'm looking to you to figure out what you need to do to get this into Debian.

At the risk of sounding standoffish or overly opinionated, I don't see any real need for a man page for this project in the 21st century; it's not as critical to have the documentation easily available offline and without web browser access as coreutils is.

My suggestion is that you package a stub manpage that informs the user that they can run watchman -h for help or that they can visit https://github.com/facebook/watchman to read the documentation online.

Thanks!

[wez]

Closing this out because it seems to have gone cold. Feel free to open individual issues for things that you discover as you work through debian packaging.

[jimthedev]

@sspreitzer Are you still working on packaging watchman?

[Polve]

I'm interested in knowing that too

[shirishag75]

same here.