[Fedora-packaging] removal of pre-built files

[Jussi Lehtola]

On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 15:55 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Matthias Clasen <mclasen at redhat.com> writes:
> > On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 15:17 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> I don't like Proposal #2 a bit.  The particular case that is going to
> >> bite me is that this policy requires me to rebuild documentation files
> >> (.pdfs, etc) from source.  Which is possible, but it vastly expands the
> >> BuildRequires footprint of the package, to say nothing of the build
> >> time.
> 
> > Seconded. This will cause multilib conflicts in many packages, due to
> > randomness introduced in doc builds, such as generated ids, etc.
> 
> Hadn't thought of that, but it's a good point.  Another issue is that
> expanding BuildRequires to cover doc toolchains is likely to create
> cases of circular build dependencies that don't exist today.  Those
> situations are a *serious* PITA for the maintainers involved :-(
> ... so we should avoid mandating that for marginal reasons.

.. not to mention that at least documentation in (La)TeX can sometimes
be a PITA to compile.

Does recompiling the documentation add any value? No, in case the
version compiled by upstream is up to date, since the result should be
equal. Using ready built documentation doesn't result in any security
issues, incompatibilities or whatnot, so there's really no need to touch
it until it is unsatisfactory in some meaningful sense.
-- 
Jussi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
jussilehtola at fedoraproject.org