On Wed, 2022-10-26 at 18:30 +0200, Gerardo Ballabio wrote: > Yes, probably. It seems you look at programs from the perspective of a > big project like Debian, as components in a larger whole. Its more like every software project has relationships (depending on or depended on by or both) with other projects, regardless of whether they are packaged in a distro or not. Every project is part of an ecosystem of software, no person is an island and no software project sits alone with no other software nearby in some way. I prefer to acknowledge those relationships and keep them visible rather than hiding them behind embedded code copies or generated files in the VCS and tarballs. > Agreed, but there may be exceptions. For example, the configure script > is normally shipped within the tarball although it's generated from > configure.ac and thus it's "not source". That's to allow people to > build the program without installing the autotools suite. As I see it, > the argument for shipping html files follows a similar logic. I agree there may be exceptions, but I think most of them are from a bygone era and are no longer needed. The autotools approach especially isn't necessary in a world where it is possible to install autotools on pretty much every platform. At minimum, the autotools cruft should be distributed in a separate tarball to the source, although that isn't yet possible with current automake. The only acceptable exception I can think of would be if it is prohibitively costly resource wise to do the build (say build longer than 24h), but even then I would still distribute the build result separately to the source. > To me, making a separate doc package seems an exaggeration for a > simple program like this. It needn't be a separate doc package, just the prebuilt package. Anyways, sorry for side-tracking your thread and thanks for discussing. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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