Daniel Campbell wrote: > On 05/11/2017 12:51 AM, Michał Górny wrote: >> In fact, I'm personally leaning towards not building docs at all >> in ebuilds. It's practically a wasted effort since most of the time >> users read docs online anyway. > I believe that's a little myopic; a user (or even developer) may not > have Internet access all the time, or may not have it in their primary > development environment. Having a copy of the docs locally (the entire > point of USE="doc") is super valuable to have when you're away from the > network. I'm sure I'm not alone as one of the people who uses the flag > and appreciates the work that goes into making sure said flag works. > > Sure, we could yank out every single USE="doc", but then we lose a nice > feature of the tree and users are back to either (a) trawling the Web to > find the project site, then hope they have docs in a separate download, > or (b) we end up with foo+1 packages, one extra for any package that has > documentation. Neither are particularly good solutions; Debian has done > the latter and it results in a huge number of packages for little gain.
As a long term user, I always look at the docs first. One reason, the docs should match the version I have installed. If a package has changed recently, the online docs become version dependent which makes it harder to find online. I've actually ran into that before when I'm googling trying to get something to work to only find out that the way things are set up has changed and no longer applies to what I have installed. Having the docs included when available should be required. Dale :-) :-)
