Re: Generally accepted cut-off limit for -doc packages

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

On Mon, 5 May 2003, David B Harris wrote:

> >      If a package comes with large amounts of documentation which many
> >      users of the package will not require you should create a
> >      separate binary package to contain it, so that it does not take
> >      up disk space on the machines of users who do not need or want it
> >      installed.
> >
> > I did not found a reference to a cut-off limit and would like to know
> > which additional document to debian-policy would define such a limit.
>
> "large amounts" is the key word there.
But large amount is quite fuzzy here.  James "defines" this as an absolute
amount of ~500k.

> Something in lintian would make sense, but since what constitutes a
> "large amount" changes over time, something in Policy is probably not
> the best approach.
Because of the changing over time nature I followed the rule that it
compares relatively to the package size.  The stats in my previous mail
show that the documentation is about 35% from the whole package which
is in my opinion large.  James responded to this arguing that this rule
would produce a lot of extra documentation packages.

But IMHO the relative definition - sanely applied for PS and PDF files
not to plain text in each small package - would make sense and is no
real reason to reject a package.

Kind regards

         Andreas.