[Fedora-packaging] Should INSTALL file presented in RPM?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 3:43 PM, yersinia <yersinia.spiros at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 7:37 PM, John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> On 09/27/2013 01:08 AM, Christopher Meng wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I plan to file tickets(bugs) to notify packagers of including INSTALL
>> > files in RPMs. I think we don't have the needs to ship these files for
>> > install instructions.
>> >
>> > Any ideas? If all you agree I will start doing it now.
>>
>> NAK, bad idea
>>
>> Many INSTALL files contain valuable information potentially beyond just
>> how to build and install the project. At times it can also be very
>> helpful to understand how the RPM packaging may have deviated from the
>> generic instructions or may have applied specific configuration to the
>> generic installation instructions.
>>
>> I have seen specific distro README for this, Many packages do something
> totally different in different distro. Think to clamav, just for example.
>
> Best
>

Excluding that was provided by the package authors seems a very, very bad
idea. I'm staring at the "INSTALL" notes with the subversion package, which
are very, very good installation notes. They're precisely what a developer
needs to understand the number of dependencies they'll be working with, and
to try building their own testable version without going through RPM
building, which can take *a lot* of time to build the toolchain for.

Instead of excluding useless INSTALL notes, encourage package authors to
write much, much better ones like these.
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