Hi Omar,
Omar Polo wrote on Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 10:10:44AM +0200:
> The update itself is straightforward and all tests are passing.
> However, upstream added three more man pages (for a total of four now)
> which would get shipped in all of four fennel flavors (lua5[1-3]).
>
> Now, this is practice works, i.e. even if you have installed all the
> flavors `man fennel-api' works and since all the manpages are
> identical it's not really important if mandoc chooses fennel-5.1-api
> or fennel-5.4-api.
>
> However, I disliked to ship the same set of man pages four times, so
> here's an attempt to move them to a -docs subpackage. (thanks sthen@
> for pointing me at www/squid)
I wouldn't consider saving the diskspace for three manual pages the
main benefit, even though that hardly hurts, either. It seems more
important that your approach of making a subpackage prevents apropos(1)
from listing multiple pages and making the user wonder whether they
differ, possibly wasting their time running diff(1).
This is even likely to become worse in the near future when man(1)
starts warning that there are multiple manual pages of the same name
in the same section.
However, *if* you expect that the pages are likely to actually
become different in the future, that might be a reason against
making this subpackage. Then again, if that happens, it would
also be an option to merge them back in after it happens.
> Note that RUN_DEPENDS-docs is needed otherwise (via lua.port.mk and
> global RUN_DEPENDS) it ends up depending on lang/lua,${FLAVOR} and
> that will break subsequent build (the plist register the deps on one
> flavor, when building the next one the plist would differ)
Again, i don't think these technical considerations are the only
reason for RUN_DEPENDS-docs. I general, i stongly feel that if
you say "pkg_add food", that should absolutely install all the
documentation for the "foo" daemon. I mean, how is the user
supposed to use it if there is no documentation? We want sane
defaults, and installing software without documentation is not
exactly sane. Why should we send the user on a wild goose chase
to search for a "foo" documentation package after they alraedy
said they want food?
I certainly don't want to emulate the bad habit of some Linux
distros to not install documentation unless the user goes an extra
mile specifically asking for it.
> However, I'm not sure I'm overthinking it and just rename the three
> new manpages to fennel-${V}-XYZ instead of doing a subpackage would be
> preferred.
I did not audit this ports-wise, but i do like your general idea.
It doesn't feel like overengineering to me, there appear to be actual
benefits from the user perspective.
Yours,
Ingo
