Re: To doc or not to doc, that's the question. (long RFC)
> 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. (Debian always wanted to be considered as "base" for other
> distributions.) With this, the "DDD" (Debian Doc Distribution :-) would
> get its own release schedule (if that's necessary) and so on.
I don't see a problem with having "docs" right along side "main" and the
others. You wouldn't want to put program documentation (so maybe "docs"
is not the best name -- "info"?) because that is very often tied to
a specific version of a program, but it would be great for information
that is untied -- especially any huge amount of it. Debian could easily
not include it on a CD if it was too large, or even on its own CD.
> Of course, dependencies would get harder. (A package in main may not
> depend on a package outside of main, for example.)
If the information is generally unconnected to programs, they will probably
almost never be mentioned by actual program packages. And, if mentioned,
wouldn't be anything more than "Suggests:".
> 2. We'd have to define some policy to tell where a doc package goes. If
> "emacs" is in main, I'd like to have emacs-doc there too. But the
> `bible-kjv' package, for example, could be moved to the new distrib.
And all the newspapers, magazines, and other journals.
> 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?
I don't know off hand what that project is, but it does sound like the right
place for it.
> 4. Some docs _are_ version dependent so these should stay in main (using
> the same stable/unstable cycle as the programs itself). For example, I'd
> like to have the same version of the man pages as of the program it
> documents.
Absolutely.
> 5. Each language could have its own doc-distrib or there is only one big
> doc-distrib with `sections' for each language.
Good thought!
Brian
( bcwhite@verisim.com )
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