On Fri, 20 Feb 1998, Adam P. Harris wrote: > [You (Bill Leach)] > >Has the idea been discussed about seperating out more of the > >documentation packages from the executable packages? > > > >It has seemed to me that it would be a great benefit to many sysadms if > >most packages like smail, sendmail, qmail, apache, etc. had their > >documentation in seperate packages that were suggested by the executable > >and installable independently. Optionally dpkg/dselect (diety?) could > >be changed to intentionally do partial package installations. > > OTOH, more packages means more packages, which makes for more stuff to be > managed (i.e., package updates). > > Personally, I don't think doc packages should be separate unless they are > huge! I.e., over 1MB. Maybe when a decent "grouping" system or better > interface comes out, I'll change my tune. I.e., deity. > > Mind you, I think splitting docs is generally a good idea, i.e., for > stripped down routers or for having doco for stuff which isn't installed > locally. It's just going to cause problems for package management.
I think that it would be good for dpkg to have two options like --no-docs and --docs-only that would install anything but the docs or only the docs, respectively. 'Docs' would be anything under /usr/doc and perhaps also any man pages. Has this discussion taken place before? Was there a consensus? Should I start this discussion (again) on debian-devel or not? Remco
