Hi folks!
To summarize this discussion so far: I think everyone here agrees that we
should provide HTML and INFO.
So we currently have three options, both having their advantages and
disadvantages:
(Arguments with `(-)' will become obsolete when deity is available, see
below.)
Option 1: Put HTML and GNU info manuals into seperate packages (if they
require more disk space than 100k, together).
Advantages:
- Great flexibility for the users. They can skip doc at all, or
just install info or HTML, or both.
- No waste of bandwidth for downloading docs one does not need.
Disadvantages:
- A little more work for the maintainers.
(-) A few more packages in the archive (see below) and thus a little
bit confusing for newbies (until deity becomes available).
Option 2: Put HTML and GNU info manuals into one package.
Advantages:
- Not much additional work for maintainers.
- Only few new packages (see below).
Disadvantages:
(-) Waste of disk space: everyone has to install both formats.
- Waste of bandwith: you have to download both formats all the
time.
Option 3: We ship .texi files and produce HTML and/or info files on
demand (in the postinst script).
Advantages:
- No work for the maintainers.
- Great flexibility (the sysadmin could even produce PostScript
files when needed!).
- No new packages necessary, no additional space in the Debian
archive will be needed.
Disadvantages:
- Everyone needs "makeindex" and "texi2html" installed. (We could
package these up in a "debian-doc-base" package.)
- Installation process will get slower (especially on 386
machines!).
Note, that ``deity,'' which is expected for Debian 2.0, will change this
scenario a bit:
Option 1:
disadvantage of too many packages will disappear, since deity will
be capable of handling more packages with confusing the sysadmin
Option 2:
disadvantage of "wasted disk size" will disappear, since deity will
allow the local sysadmin not to install files that match certain
patterns, for example /usr/info/*
I'm sure deity will be available for 2.0 and we should definitely take
this into account for our decision now. I think we could live with both
disadvantages for a few months very well until deity is available.
My prediction is that while a few people will like option 3) very much, it
will be unacceptable by a few others. (People usually don't want to
compile docs when installing a firewall :-)
So I think we have to look for a consensus in options 1) and 2).
I just wrote a little perl script that checks all packages in "hamm/main"
about how much disk space is required for /usr/info/*, alltogether. The
result is: 12814 kbytes. (This is actually so low, that we should stop
this silly discussion immediately ;-)
Because of this, I propose:
- The packages that carry the info documentation should also carry the
html documentation.
- If all docs in a package exceed a limit (say 1mb), it has to go in a
seperate package. (This is current policy anyways. We'd just have to
specify the limit.)
(BTW, I'm assuming that *.info.gz requires the same amount of disk space
as *.html.gz. I'm sure we find a way to use .html.gz files somehow.)
Any comments are welcome,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Debian is looking [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
for a logo! Have a
look at our drafts PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
at http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/debian-logo/
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