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

[Axel Thimm]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 04:32:58PM +0200, 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.

For minimal chroots you can install packages w/o docs, therefore the
functionality of the package should not be hindered if docs are
missing. Man & info, as well as /usr/share/doc/* are usually
discardable, e.g. only used directly, not though the application.

> 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?

It seems like the only rpm-internal purpose of the doc flag on files
is indeed to be able to skip them on installation, but this knowledge
has been burried in the sands of time. As a side effect %doc on
relative paths performs a copy operation, too, which is the most
common use today.

I think it's better to not assume %doc'ed files are really around for
the application to use.

BTW are gnome help files tagged as %doc?
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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