just throwing a quick $0.02 in here,
On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 01:51:30PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > Well, being able to read the documentation (including the man page) of a
> > binary without requiring the binary to be installed is a good thing
> > IMHO. Especially for big and complex software that is likely to be
> > split to pkg and pkg-data...
>
> I prefer to have a 1:1 correlation between binaries and manpages. But
> that is just me.
i think the idea is that if you have the package providing the binary
installed, you implicitly have the -data package installed. so, does
it matter that if you manually chose to do so, you could have manpages
for binaries not on your system, as long as you could never have
binaries on your system without their manpages?
> Other things would be cron jobs, inetd entries, init.d scripts. I'm
> not sure that putting the init.d script into foo-data is the best
> idea.
there are cases where having these files in a seperate package can
be a good thing. for example, two packages i have direct experience
with (nagios and mysql) both profit from having a single "-common"
(arch: all) package which shares init scripts, web server
configs, etc between multiple server-providing binary packages
(nagios-{text,mysql,pgsql}, mysql-server-{4.1,5.0}).
the proviso is that a little more care has to be taken to make sure that
some of these things behave in the absence of the "binary" package.
policy already states that init scripts (9.3.2) and cronjobs (9.5)
must do so, the other stuff is a little more context dependant.
sean
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