Proposal - location of LICENSE and README files

Miroslav Suchý msuchy at redhat.com
Thu Aug 29 09:13:26 UTC 2013


Hi,
all rubygems put their README and LICENSE files in %{gem_instdir}. This is opposed to all other packages, which put such 
files into %{_docdir}/%{name}-%{version}. And all users and developers expect those files in this directory. Of course 
but ruby developers who expect them in %{gem_instdir}.

Therefore I propose to put into Ruby guidelines this scriplet to unify this behavior:

```
%install
mkdir -p %{buildroot}%{_pkgdocdir}
for docfile in README; do
     mv %{buildroot}%{gem_instdir}/$docfile %{buildroot}%{_pkgdocdir}
     ln -s %{_pkgdocdir}/$docfile %{buildroot}%{gem_instdir}
done

%files
%doc    %{gem_instdir}/README
%doc    %{_pkgdocdir}/README
```

and put this text into ruby guidelines:
```
All documentation files, which resides in %{gem_instdir}, should be moved to %{_pkgdocdir}. Symbolic link from 
%{gem_instdir}/<moved file> to %{_pkgdocdir}/<moved file> should be created. This especially apply on README and LICENSE 
files.
```

Obviously the choice is to have symlink from %{gem_instdir} to %{_pkgdocdir}. Or from %{_pkgdocdir} to %{gem_instdir}.
I choosed the first option as those doc files are not needed for runtime and IMO should not be located in %{gem_instdir} 
and it should be located under /usr/share/doc as all other packages do.

Opinions?

-- 
Miroslav Suchy, RHCE, RHCDS
Red Hat, Software Engineer, #brno, #devexp, #fedora-buildsys


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