Hi Tom,
Is there a 'must' requirement in Debian for documents ? On Fedora, I try to avoid building the documents for exactly this reason, the infra to build them is too fragile.
It's not a hard requirement. The doc package builds were a lot less fragile when these doc packages were first introduced. The dependency tree for the docs was at one point quite minimal, but has become more complex over time.
If the offline HTML doc packages have become a significant
burden, then maybe we should drop them. That would be sad, but we
can always bring them back if the situation improves in the
future.
Sincerely,
Cory Bloor