Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes:
> As always, once I start seriously poking at an area of Policy, I see
> other little things that need to be fixed as well. Here is a general
> overhaul of the additional documentation section, which should both
> address this bug as well as a few other things.
[...]
Here is an updated version of the patch with feedback to date taken into
account.
diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
index c1ff4b4..4dce37c 100644
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -9702,45 +9702,77 @@ END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
</p>
</sect>
- <sect>
+ <sect id="docs-additional">
<heading>Additional documentation</heading>
<p>
- Any additional documentation that comes with the package may
- be installed at the discretion of the package maintainer.
- Plain text documentation should be installed in the directory
- <file>/usr/share/doc/<var>package</var></file>, where
- <var>package</var> is the name of the package, and
- compressed with <tt>gzip -9</tt> unless it is small.
- </p>
+ Any additional documentation that comes with the package may be
+ installed at the discretion of the package maintainer. It is
+ often a good idea to include text information files
+ (<file>README</file>s, FAQs, and so forth) that come with the
+ source package in the binary package. However, you don't need
+ to install the instructions for building and installing the
+ package, of course!
+ </p>
<p>
- If a package comes with large amounts of documentation which
- many users of the package will not require you should create
- a separate binary package to contain it, so that it does not
- take up disk space on the machines of users who do not need
- or want it installed.</p>
+ Plain text documentation should be compressed with <tt>gzip
+ -9</tt> unless it is small.
+ </p>
<p>
- It is often a good idea to put text information files
- (<file>README</file>s, changelogs, and so forth) that come with
- the source package in <file>/usr/share/doc/<var>package</var></file>
- in the binary package. However, you don't need to install
- the instructions for building and installing the package, of
- course!</p>
+ If a package comes with large amounts of documentation that many
+ users of the package will not require, you should create a
+ separate binary package to contain it so that it does not take
+ up disk space on the machines of users who do not need or want
+ it installed. As a special case of this rule, shared library
+ documentation of any appreciable size should always be packaged
+ with the library development package (<ref id="sharedlibs-dev">)
+ or in a separate documentation package, since shared libraries
+ are frequently installed as dependencies of other packages by
+ users who have little interest in documentation of the library
+ itself. The documentation package for the
+ package <var>package</var> is conventionally
+ named <var>package</var>-doc
+ (or <var>package</var>-doc-<var>language-code</var> if there are
+ separate documentation packages for multiple languages).
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Additional documentation included in the package should be
+ installed under <file>/usr/share/doc/<var>package</var></file>.
+ If the documentation is packaged separately,
+ as <var>package</var>-doc for example, it may be installed under
+ either that path or into the documentation directory for the
+ separate documentation package
+ (<file>/usr/share/doc/<var>package</var>-doc</file> in this
+ example). However, installing the documentation into the
+ documentation directory of the main package is preferred since
+ it is independent of the packaging method and will be easier for
+ users to find.
+ </p>
+
+ <p>
+ Any separate package providing documentation must still install
+ standard documentation files in its
+ own <file>/usr/share/doc</file> directory as specified in the
+ rest of this policy. See, for example, <ref id="copyrightfile">
+ and <ref id="changelogs">.
+ </p>
<p>
Packages must not require the existence of any files in
<file>/usr/share/doc/</file> in order to function
<footnote>
- The system administrator should be able to
- delete files in <file>/usr/share/doc/</file> without causing
- any programs to break.
- </footnote>.
- Any files that are referenced by programs but are also
- useful as stand alone documentation should be installed under
- <file>/usr/share/<var>package</var>/</file> with symbolic links from
- <file>/usr/share/doc/<var>package</var></file>.
+ The system administrator should be able to delete files
+ in <file>/usr/share/doc/</file> without causing any programs
+ to break.
+ </footnote>. Any files that are used or read by programs but
+ are also useful as stand alone documentation should be installed
+ elsewhere, such as
+ under <file>/usr/share/<var>package</var>/</file>, and then
+ included via symbolic links
+ in <file>/usr/share/doc/<var>package</var></file>.
</p>
<p>
@@ -9760,18 +9792,6 @@ END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
</p>
</footnote>
</p>
-
- <p>
- Former Debian releases placed all additional documentation
- in <file>/usr/doc/<var>package</var></file>. This has been
- changed to <file>/usr/share/doc/<var>package</var></file>,
- and packages must not put documentation in the directory
- <file>/usr/doc/<var>package</var></file>. <footnote>
- At this phase of the transition, we no longer require a
- symbolic link in <file>/usr/doc/</file>. At a later point,
- policy shall change to make the symbolic links a bug.
- </footnote>
- </p>
</sect>
<sect>
@@ -9782,16 +9802,16 @@ END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
via HTML.</p>
<p>
- If your package comes with extensive documentation in a
+ If the package comes with extensive documentation in a
markup format that can be converted to various other formats
you should if possible ship HTML versions in a binary
- package, in the directory
- <file>/usr/share/doc/<var>appropriate-package</var></file> or
- its subdirectories.<footnote>
- The rationale: The important thing here is that HTML
- docs should be available in <em>some</em> package, not
- necessarily in the main binary package.
+ package.<footnote>
+ Rationale: The important thing here is that HTML
+ documentation should be available from <em>some</em>
+ binary package.
</footnote>
+ The documentation must be installed as specified in
+ <ref id="docs-additional">.
</p>
<p>
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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