Re: README - confusing, irrelevant, redundant, useless

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit "W. Borgert" <debacle@debian.org>
> On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 12:42:27PM +0200, Henning Makholm wrote:

>> Yes - but how should Lintian detect it?  Of course one could look for
>> lines that start with whitespace plus "./configure ", but how reliable
>> is that?

> Attached test found some culprits:

It seems like it might be worthwhile. Some packages would need
overrides, of course.

> aptitude

/usr/share/doc/aptitude/README is upstream's entire user manual in
text format. It contains a short section on how to get aptitude if
one does not have a .deb available. I think this is fair, but it is of
course correct that the file *contains* installation instructions.

> finger ftp gettext libatk1.0-0 libpam0g libtiff4 libungif4g libxml2
> m4 man-db netkit-inetd tar telnet w3m zlib1g

These READMEs seem to be actually useless for end users.

> python2.3

The bulk of this README are installation instructions, but there is
also a roadmap to other documentation that may be useful for end users
and should be provided instead of the entire file.

> sharutils

Borderline case. Some useful information, but also confusing
references to documentation files that do not exist in the .deb.

> autofs dbus-1 dbus-glib-1 deborphan dhcp3-client docbook2x etherape
> ethereal-common ettercap-common gimp-gap gjdoc gpm kismet libpcre3
> nano netkit-inetd nfs-common python-gtk2 ruby1.8 xfce4-session
> xfwm4-themes xfwm4

I don't have these installed locally and did not bother to download
them to check.

-- 
Henning Makholm                        "Detta, sade de, vore rena sanningen;
                                 ty de kunde tala sanning lika väl som någon
                             annan, när de bara visste vad det tjänade til."