Bill Allombert wrote: > On Thu, Dec 05, 2024 at 10:13:24AM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote: >> Package: debian-policy >> Version: 4.7.0.1 >> Severity: wishlist >> Tags: patch >> X-Debbugs-Cc: j...@joshtriplett.org >> >> Packages already tend to avoid requiring any files from /usr/share/man >> or /usr/share/info, and don't require files in /usr/share/locale if >> running in a C or C.UTF-8 locale. >> >> The attached patch documents this in Policy, so that it's explicitly >> supported for sysadmins to use dpkg exclusions or similar mechanisms to >> delete /usr/share/doc, /usr/share/info, and /usr/share/locale. > > You mean /usr/share/man
Yes, I did. Good catch; will fix. >> To the best of my knowledge, this documents existing behavior, and will >> not introduce any new bugs on any packages. > > Well, I would like to see some hard evidence. > For example, is it OK to build Debian packages on such systems? > > What is a graceful failure for some script is a crash for another... I would be happy to reduce the expectations of the language here; when I said "gracefully" here, the only case I had in mind was "doesn't fail silently" (e.g. just exiting or having a menu item silently fail, without showing any message). I would also be happy to reduce this to a "should". I can certainly offer anecdata to the effect that I haven't observed any issues on such systems in a long time. But we could also make it a "should" for a while, and see if anyone observes issues and reports bugs. I think there's enough anecdata on this to support a move to "should", which gives people leave to report *normal* bugs, and see how that goes.
