[Guidelines Change] Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

[Ville Skyttä]

On Wednesday 15 December 2010, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-12-15 at 22:25 +0200, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> > "Files marked as documentation must not cause additional dependencies
> > that aren't satisfied by the package itself or its dependency chain as
> > it would be if none of its files marked as documentation were included
> > in the package."
> 
> Doesn't this exclude things like man pages, since they need a man page
> formatter to display them that would not be required were those docs not
> included in a package? If so, it seems like an excessive limitation.

I thought about adding something that if there's a concern that people will 
try to abuse the above guideline for something, some refinements could be 
added, but I believe people are capable of applying common sense.  But if 
someone can plug this potential loophole in the text and still keep it 
understandable, please feel free to rephrase it.

But how many packages nowadays require a man page reader simply because they 
install man pages?

$ repoquery --repoid=rawhide --whatrequires man-db
man-db-0:2.5.9-2.fc15.x86_64
gmrun-0:0.9.2-22.fc14.x86_64
guestfish-1:1.7.23-1.fc15.x86_64
libtirpc-devel-0:0.2.1-6.fc15.i686
libtirpc-devel-0:0.2.1-6.fc15.x86_64
man-pages-cs-0:0.18.20090209-10.fc15.noarch
man-pages-es-0:1.55-15.fc14.noarch
man-pages-fr-0:3.23-4.fc15.noarch
man-pages-it-0:2.80-7.fc14.noarch
man-pages-ja-0:20101205-1.fc15.noarch
man-pages-ko-2:20050219-18.fc14.noarch
man-pages-pl-0:0.24-11.fc15.noarch
man-pages-ru-0:0.98-2.fc15.noarch
man-pages-uk-0:0.1-0.13.20071108.fc15.noarch
manedit-0:1.2.1-3.1.fc14.x86_64
redhat-lsb-0:4.0-5.fc14.i686
redhat-lsb-0:4.0-5.fc14.x86_64
rpmdevtools-0:7.10-1.fc14.noarch

That's 18 packages, of which libtirpc-devel and redhat-lsb are i686/x86_64 
dupes.  I guess (haven't actually checked) that only man-pages*, gmrun, 
guestfish, and libtirpc-devel have a dependency on man reader because they 
install man pages, the others have it for some other "stronger" reason.  The 
dep is understandable in man-pages* because the whole packages would hardly be 
useful without a man page reader.  On my F-13 system, "rpm -e man" fails only 
because rpmdevtools has a dependency on /usr/bin/man (/usr/bin/manpage-alert 
invokes it).

We don't add a dependency on a web browser in packages that install HTML docs 
or a PDF reader dependency in packages that install PDF docs either, and I 
think that's very much ok.