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Re: To doc or not to doc, that's the question. (long RFC)



Christian Schwarz wrote:
> 
>   1. Your solution of moving the doc-packages upside in the archive
> means that there is a new "distribution" besides the usual "Debian
> GNU/Linux" distribution.

Not necessarily.
When hamm will become Debian-2.0 we'll have the "distribution"
Debian-2.0 (stable) and some subdirectories under it: main, contrib,
non-free and documentation.
There is a precise relation between documentation and the current
distribution: "documentation" is always "stable".

We could put main and contrib in the Official Debian CD and
documentation in a third Ofiicial CD, with different releasing scheme (I
propose monthly)


>      Of course, dependencies would get harder. (A package in main
> may not depend on a package outside of main, for example.)

of course. I don't see why a pure-docs package should depend on a
package in unstable. If this happens, the doc should stay under unstable
(which should have a symlink to the documentation directory or, better,
a forest of symlink to the packages in stable/documentation, except for
those rare that depends outside stable. I think we still have some tool
that reveles those dependencies when moving packages out of Incoming).

> 
>   2. We'd have to define some policy to tell where a doc package goes.

Yes and also HOW it is build (what should go in binary package and what
no, talking of non-pure docs pakages)

>   3. Some time ago, someone asks whether we should package up the
> whole e-texts from Project Gutenberg. Maybe the new distribution
> would be the right place?
> 

If someone ever wants to "install" PG in his hard disk.
Such a "monster" could stay on a CD "per se". Better to create a debian
package to access such a CD than transform those in .deb


>   4. Some docs _are_ version dependent so these should stay in main

Yes, should be told in the policy (I think that most of the on-line docs
that comes with a package should stay in the binary package, but some
large sources have a lot of docs ...)

>  For example, I'd
> like to have the same version of the man pages as of the program it
> documents.

Policy should say that manpages should anyway go in the binary package
(as it says now).

> 
>   5. Each language could have its own doc-distrib or there is only
> one big doc-distrib with `sections' for each language.

Something worth a discussion.
We have two possibilities for subdivide the documentation: language and
format. We must discuss this if we decide to do so.


fabrizio
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