Docutils Distributor's Guide

Author: Lea Wiemann
Contact: docutils-develop@lists.sourceforge.net
Revision: 7463
Date: 2012-06-22
Copyright: This document has been placed in the public domain.

Contents

This document describes how to create packages of Docutils (e.g. for shipping with a Linux distribution). If you have any questions, please direct them to the Docutils-develop mailing list.

First, please download the most current release tarball and unpack it.

Dependencies

Docutils has the following dependencies:

Python Files

The Docutils Python files must be installed into the site-packages/ directory of Python. Running python setup.py install should do the trick, but if you want to place the files yourself, you can just install the docutils/ directory of the Docutils tarball to /usr/lib/python/site-packages/docutils/. In this case you should also compile the Python files to .pyc and/or .pyo files so that Docutils doesn't need to be recompiled every time it's executed.

Executables

The executable front-end tools are located in the tools/ directory of the Docutils tarball.

The rst2*.py tools (except rst2newlatex.py) are intended for end-users. You should install them to /usr/bin/. You do not need to change the names (e.g. to docutils-rst2html.py) because the rst2 prefix is unique.

Documentation

The documentation should be generated using buildhtml.py. To generate HTML for all documentation files, go to the tools/ directory and run:

# Place html4css1.css in base directory.
cp ../docutils/writers/html4css1/html4css1.css ..
./buildhtml.py --stylesheet-path=../html4css1.css ..

Then install the following files to /usr/share/doc/docutils/ (or wherever you install documentation):

Removing the .txt Files

If you are tight with disk space, you can remove all .txt files in the tree except for:

  • those in the licenses/ directory because they have not been processed to HTML and
  • user/rst/cheatsheet.txt and user/rst/demo.txt, which should be readable in source form.

Before you remove the .txt files you should rerun buildhtml.py with the --no-source-link switch to avoid broken references to the source files.

Other Files

You may want to install the Emacs-Lisp files tools/editors/emacs/*.el into the appropriate directory.

Configuration File

It is possible to have a system-wide configuration file at /etc/docutils.conf. However, this is usually not necessary. You should not install tools/docutils.conf into /etc/.

Tests

While you probably do not need to ship the tests with your distribution, you can test your package by installing it and then running alltests.py from the tests/ directory of the Docutils tarball.