Hi and success building docs on Fedora 41

From: Karl <karl_at_dbdemon.com>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2025 18:20:17 UTC
Hi everyone,

I'm Karl Levik, a FreeBSD enthusiast who wanted to try his luck building 
the FreeBSD documentation (and maybe one day contribute something useful 
...).

I also wanted to report on some success I recently had with building the 
documentation on Fedora 41. (Unfortunately, I don't yet have a suitable 
FreeBSD desktop/laptop option, so I'm stuck with Fedora for now.)

$ git clone https://git.FreeBSD.org/doc.git ~/doc

Libraries are named slightly differently on Fedora-derived Linux distros 
than Debian/Ubuntu ones, so I had to use the following package 
installation command:

# sudo dnf install hugo rubygem-asciidoctor rubygem-asciidoctor-pdf 
rubygem-rouge git bmake

And then the same Linux build command as outlined in your documentation:

$ bmake run LOCALBASE=/usr

However, it turns out this doesn't work because Fedora (at least 41) 
ships with an older version of hugo. I therefore tried my luck with the 
alien tool:

# sudo dnf --no-autoremove hugo
# sudo dnf install alien

I downloaded the Hugo "extended" Debian version from the Hugo Github 
releases. Then:

# alien --to-rpm hugo_extended_0.147.6_linux-amd64.deb

(For whatever reason alien removes the "_extended" part of the name in 
the RPM, so to install:)
# dnf install hugo-0.147.6-2.x86_64.rpm

This installs hugo under /usr/local/bin/ whereas ruby is still under 
/usr/bin/ which creates some confusion for the build. I decided to just 
create a symlink:
# ln -s /usr/local/bin/hugo /usr/bin/hugo

Back in my build directories I can now build the documentation:

$ cd ~/doc/website
$ bmake run LOCALBASE=/usr

This works and I can browse the "website" in my browser on localhost. 
Likewise, the same is true for the rest of the documentation:

$ cd ~/doc/documentation
$ bmake run LOCALBASE=/usr


Best wishes,
Karl