Re: Two questions on package quality
Nikita V Youshchenko <yoush@debian.org> writes:
> 1. Upstream does not provide a manual page for the binary. Packager
> decided to add binary-without-manpage to lintian override file, and Tag:
> no-manual-for-binary to linda override file.
Please don't do this. The lintian tag can be used by others who have more
time to find all binaries without man pages and contribute man pages for
them, and overriding it defeats that purpose.
An override should only be used when what lintian is finding really isn't
a bug for reasons that lintian can't know about (for example, if the man
page is provided by some other package on which that package depends). If
the bug is present and fixing it is just hard, please leave the lintian
message there so that it's documented.
> My questions are:
> - Is having a manual page for each binary inside package a mandatory
> requirement these days?
No, it's not mandatory, it's just a bug.
> 2. Upstream tarball contains ttf-dejavu font. Linda found that and
> complained.
Why?
Sure, duplication of code is a bit annoying, but ttf-dejavu appears to be
a free font, so it doesn't hurt anything that the upstream tarball
contains it. The installed *package* shouldn't duplicate the font and
should instead just depend on the font package it needs (or possibly not
even depend -- if it's only accessing the font via X, it should only
recommend and allow for the possibility that there's an X font server
providing the font). But there's no harm that I can see in leaving the
font in the upstream tarball unless it's under some other non-DFSG-free
license, and you want to avoid repackaging the upstream tarball when you
can help it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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