[Fedora-packaging] Documentation packages and explicit Requires

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 7:52 AM, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at gmail.com> wrote:
> After many years, there still is the occasional packager, who adds
> an explicit "Requires: %{name} = %{version}-%{release}" to a noarch -doc
> subpackage which contains files one can display with any suitable program
> (such as PDF, HTML or TXT files).
>
> I don't know why they do it. The "Requiring Base Package" guidelines
> leave enough freedom to not do it and even mention -libs subpackages as one
> example where the base dep is not "needed":
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Requiring_Base_Package
>
> What do other packagers think about this?

Depends on the software. Documentation in
/usr/share/doc/[name]-docs-[version] should not be a problem. But as a
theoretical example, having having tomcat6 and tomcat7 both use
/ur/share/tomcat-docs would get nasty, and dangerous. So it does
require a bit of thought as to whether multiple versions of the same
component could have multiple versions of documentation installed,
safely, in parallel.