[Fedora-packaging] COPYING (license) not under docdir

[Paul Howarth]

Matthias Saou wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius wrote :
> 
>> If %{_datadir}/<something>/COPYING is used by a package, it's data, not
>> documentation. %doc'ing it would be a fault.
> 
> Why? I don't understand why you claim (and not even just suggest) that.
> %_defaultdocdir even defaults to a sub-directory of %_datadir in our
> current setup.
> 
> I don't see why a program's data under %_datadir couldn't contain its
> own online documentation, accessible from the program itself. And I
> really think this should be considered perfectly fine, as long as all
> of the relevant files are tagged as %doc in order to be easily
> identifiable when querying the package.
> 
> This is even probably the reason why the %doc tag exists, since
> otherwise, why would you need to query a package for its documentation
> if it was mandatory for all of it to be
> under /usr/share/doc/name-version-rel?

Documentation placed under %_datadir is both data *and* documentation. 
It's data from the point of view that the program uses it at runtime. As 
a result of this, that data should *not* be marked %doc because it would 
then be excluded from installation if the package was installed using 
"--excludedocs", and that would break the packaging rule:


    If a package includes something as %doc, it must not affect the
    runtime of the application. To summarize: If it is in %doc, the
    program must run properly if it is not present.


In the case under discussion, this would be broken if the license file 
under %_datadir was not installed, because the GTK GUI wants to be able 
to display it.

Paul.