On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 10:44:29PM +0200, Bartosz Fenski aka fEnIo wrote: > On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 01:29:38PM -0500, Marvin Renich wrote: > > netwag-doc should not have Depends: netwag. At most, it should be > > Suggests:, but even this serves no useful purpose; if you want both > > documentation and the package, you will know it (and the description > > identifies the main package). > > > > This applies to netwox-doc as well. I will not file a separate bug as > > they come from the same source package. > > Hello Marvin. > > Actually netwag-doc (and netwox-doc) has to depend on netwag (netwox > accordingly). The reason is that I don't ship /usr/share/doc/netwag-doc/ > directory with needed copyright and changelog files, but I'm just creating > symlink to /usr/share/doc/(netwag,netwox}. > > AFAIR that's certainly ok to do that and I saw it in some other packages. > > Anyway in case I'm wrong here I don't close this bug yet. > > regards > fEnIo >
Okay, now I understand why it is this way, and I now see three out of 23 installed *-doc packages on my system that do this. However, I still think it is important to be able to install the documentation separately. There are at least two good reasons you may want to do this. If you don't know what a package does, but it looks like it might be interesting, or you are not sure if it will suit your needs, you might want to look through the docs before deciding if you really want to install it. Also, you might want to keep documentation for packages on a separate machine (e.g. you have several machines including laptop(s), but all -doc pkgs are kept on one desktop server). I'm sure there are other reasons. If the only concern is that both packages need to have the copyright file and you are using a symlink to share one /usr/share/doc/... directory, an easy solution is to have the copyright file in both packages, but name the one in the -doc pkg copyright.newtag-doc. If you have both packages installed and both copyright and copyright.newtag-doc files exist in the directory and they are identical, so what? The added flexibility of not needing the binary package to read the documentation is worth it. If you decide to leave it as it is, I will yield to your judgement. Since there is already a precedent, it is certainly reasonable to downgrade this bug to wishlist. ...Marvin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
