On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 17:55 +0530, Y Giridhar Appaji Nag wrote: > > I filed a lintian wishlist bug (#527363) requesting a I/W tag when non > documentation packages recommend documentation packages.
While I support the effort to reduce disk space usage, I strongly disagree with this proposal. A software is worth nothing without appropriate documentation. When Joe User installs a package, the documentation should be installed as well, automatically (i.e "apt-get install perl" install the whole upstream package). In my opinion, the "main" package logically Depends on the -doc package, but the actual dependency header is downgraded to Recommend so system admin can choose to not install it. I think it would be much nicer to file a bug against APT so the user can choose to not install "Recommend" dependencies that sits in section "doc". [APT maintainers will hate me here] > With Install-Recommends being the default, many packages pull in a lot > of associated documentation. These documentation packages are > sometimes large and could be suggested rather than recommended. I > noticed different opinions about such bugs on the BTS (See #504042 > that went on to be fixed and #526153 that was not). Regarding the perl-doc (Bug #504042), I believe it's a different story. The development documentation for libraries and programming languages should not be installed by the runtime. This probably means that packages like perl, python, texlive... should provide a $foo, $foo-doc and $foo-runtime (or -bin, or lib$foo, or whatever). Other package that needs to depend on that tool should then depend on $foo-runtime. > I understand that upstream would sometimes like documentation to be > installed alongside the binaries Upstream want it because it's sensible for their (and our) users. > but popcon numbers of -doc packages are quite lower the numbers > corresponding to the packages that recommend them. Don't make popcon statistics lie. The reason why -doc popcon is much lower than associated package is because -doc are "recommended" and Debian-installer's tasksel don't install recommend packages. IIRC > Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against > these packages? I am including a tentative dd-list corresponding to > the packages[1] that I found after manually removing some packages[2]. > I will modify it based on suggestions. Regards, Franklin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
