On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 06:58:37PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: > ]] Geert Stappers > > > FWIW I agree with both '"main package "should have documentation' > > and 'additional documentation in separate doc package'. > > I think we should stop recommending documentation be put in a separate > package and tell people who don't want docs to exclude the relevant > parts of /usr/share/doc using dpkg excludes instead. Disk space is > pretty cheap and we keep complaining about the per-package overhead in > Packages.gz, so it should be a net gain for most people.
Disk space may not be the only reason to have a separate -doc package. It may also allow to demote some build-dependencies to build-depends-indep. Just think of packages that a need a lot of texlive-* packages just to build some documentation. I have recently seen FTBFS on buildds because texlive-* and/or graphviz was unavailable on some architectures. Being able to move these out of build-depends resolved the problem. -Ralf.