[Fedora-packaging] Executable documentation

[Ville Skyttä]

On Saturday 24 February 2007, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> For some time I've been working under the assumption that executable
> documentation is a bad idea.  rpmlint complains when documentation
> generates dependencies, and these dependencies are often needless
> bloat.
>
> Lately I'm getting pushback when asking for a quick chmod -x of docs.
> The usual argument is "It's an example, it's supposed to be
> executable."  Currently I don't see anything in the guidelines that
> would forbid this as long as it doesn't cause extra dependencies.
>
> So, is there concensus that allowing documentation to be executable is
> OK?  Or is it something that should be prohibited.

I don't see anything wrong with including example scripts etc as executable if 
they're useful and can be executed as is and don't result in additional 
dependencies.

Note that rpmlint does try to check if a dependency from docs is an additional 
one or not and suppresses output if it's not, however it doesn't do any 
depsolving which results in some warnings that can be argued to be false 
positives.  Warnings about doc dependencies such as eg. /bin/sh for any 
package, or /usr/bin/perl for things that already require perl(...) can IMO 
be ignored.

But the packager needs to keep an eye on possble future package splits etc 
which may result in the doc dependency previously indirectly satisfied by 
other dependencies in the package no longer resulting in that, and to act 
accordingly when/if that happens.