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?
Can we please get rid of such bloat in plain Documentation packages? These dependencies pull in lots of stuff even if one only wants to peruse the documentation (e.g. when taking a brief look at an API or what an application can do).
On 23 July 2015 at 12:52, Michael Schwendt mschwendt@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?
Can we please get rid of such bloat in plain Documentation packages? These dependencies pull in lots of stuff even if one only wants to peruse the documentation (e.g. when taking a brief look at an API or what an application can do). -- packaging mailing list packaging@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/packaging
Totally agree. I seem to recall we removed the requirement for javadoc packages a long time ago. The cases that still remain where a javadoc package still requires its base package are likely to be low maintainance packages that never need touching.
On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 11:03 PM, Mat Booth mat@matbooth.co.uk wrote:
On 23 July 2015 at 12:52, Michael Schwendt mschwendt@gmail.com wrote:
Can we please get rid of such bloat in plain Documentation packages? These dependencies pull in lots of stuff even if one only wants to peruse the documentation (e.g. when taking a brief look at an API or what an application can do).
Totally agree.
Me too.
And while on the subject of documentation packages but unrelated to the deps issue, standardizing naming on -doc would be nice, the former is more common and used by other distros.
On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 7:52 AM, Michael Schwendt mschwendt@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?
Can we please get rid of such bloat in plain Documentation packages? These dependencies pull in lots of stuff even if one only wants to peruse the documentation (e.g. when taking a brief look at an API or what an application can do).
Agree +1
As I've seen how people fiddle with that, doc packaging has been a mess. Someone name -doc package to -docs, and someone build them as arch-dependant packages.
-doc subpkg shouldn't require main pkg, just as Mat said above, it's really irritating to view docs while pulling in lots of dependencies. Some doc package are really large, and base pkg it pulls is even larger.
"VS" == Ville Skyttä ville.skytta@iki.fi writes:
VS> And while on the subject of documentation packages but unrelated to VS> the deps issue, standardizing naming on -doc would be nice, the VS> former is more common and used by other distros.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Documentation
" Or if there's a lot of documentation, consider putting it into a subpackage. In this case, it is recommended to use *-doc as the subpackage name. "
That could be strengthened, I suppose, though I imagine if someone ignores the recommendation now they'd probably ignore the requirement in the future.
It would also be easy to make rpmlint or fedora-review (or both) complain about it.
- J<
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).
Thanks for your email Michael - I just checked my packages and found a few -javadoc packages that unnecessarily depend on the base package.
Regards,
Richard
And while on the subject of documentation packages but unrelated to the deps issue, standardizing naming on -doc would be nice, the former is more common and used by other distros.
Do you think that should apply to javadoc packages too? At the moment, the Java packaging guidelines say:
"Java API documentation MUST be placed into a sub-package called %{name}-javadoc."
which is much stronger than the general recommendation that documentation should go into a -doc package.
Regards,
Richard
Le 23/07/2015 13:52, Michael Schwendt a écrit :
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?
Requiring Base package is not mandatory, but providing the License in all case is mandatory.
So requiring the base package can solves this (and avoid having to duplicate the LICENSE file in both packages).
It also ensure the documentation fit the installed base package else you can have foo 1.2 and foo-doc 2.3
Remi.
Can we please get rid of such bloat in plain Documentation packages? These dependencies pull in lots of stuff even if one only wants to peruse the documentation (e.g. when taking a brief look at an API or what an application can do). -- packaging mailing list packaging@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/packaging
On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 1:50 PM, Richard Fearn richardfearn@gmail.com wrote:
And while on the subject of documentation packages but unrelated to the deps issue, standardizing naming on -doc would be nice, the former is more common and used by other distros.
Do you think that should apply to javadoc packages too?
No strong opinions. On the other hand they're a bit different than the average documentation package but then again I suppose for other languages API docs go to -doc, and I don't know why Java should be any different.
On Sat, 25 Jul 2015 14:04:30 +0200, Remi Collet wrote:
Requiring Base package is not mandatory, but providing the License in all case is mandatory.
So requiring the base package can solves this (and avoid having to duplicate the LICENSE file in both packages).
That's neglectable for -doc subpackages, which are split off because of their size. A single small license file doesn't make a big different then.
It also ensure the documentation fit the installed base package else you can have foo 1.2 and foo-doc 2.3
Why would that be a problem?
The documentation does not "need" the base package at install-time and not at run-time either.
A strict dependency would even make it impossible to install the documentation without updating the installation.
Btw, lots of dependencies in the Fedora package collection are not versioned anyway, so on non-updated installations, there can be various version mismatches (such as unsafe inter-dependencies based on automatic soname deps without symbol versioning -- one reason why some maintainers would like strictly versioned inter-dependencies everywhere). Adding them to -doc subpackages is the wrong place where to start.
On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 7:52 AM, Michael Schwendt mschwendt@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.
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