New comment by ahesford on void-packages repository

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/35082#issuecomment-1015415324

Comment:
Cloning the git repo is generally undesirable with xbps-src. The best fix from our perspective would be for upstream to include pre-generated docs in the release tarballs. This requires a bit of release engineering but shouldn't be too terrible and can be scripted for future releases.

In general, I think maintaining a separate changelog is good practice for several reasons:

1. It doesn't require repository history to review.
2. It provides an opportunity to add context to some more sophisticated changes.
3. Not all Git commits are worth inclusion in history. Changelogs should provide a good summary of substantive changes, not every minor tweak. (Does it really matter to others that you fixed a typo in one commit that you introduced in the preceding commit?)


For packages that require doc generation, we have sometimes used a hostmakedepends trick to get those docs in cross-compiled packages. For native packages, the docs are built as expected; for cross builds, the package itself is added to hostmakedepends. The docs can then be copied from the native package on the host to the $DESTDIR. Yes, this is a hack, but it works.