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Re: Proposal: remove man and info entries from dh config files



Hi,

It all depends on how intrusive you want to get and where, but for the
packages where I have had to modify the /rules for embedded builds, I
have begun using the convention of 'DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS = weakpolicy' to
mean the package build should ignore all policy related to installing
documentation, and only install the binary files required for execution.
In many cases you can just not call the particular dh_* commands related
to docs rather than modifying the files they read.

Neil and I talked a little about this on #emdebian, but if people want
to formalise it a bit and publish some recommendations on terminology
and best practice, I think that would be helpful toward easier automation
of building minimal debs for embedded use.  Having every package do this
a different way, or hand removing things from them for each release, is
going to make for a lot of busy man-hours.

I know there is also talk of filtering such files at install time, which
might also have much the same effect, but in the absence of that, this
works now, and doesn't rely on a heuristic.  The package can be properly
customised in all facets for embedded use, and built that way when
required.  We should be able to submit patches for this to the distro
maintainers in the same way translators do.  The regular maintainer may
not care for these builds, but if we show them a standard form and give
them help to follow, adopt, or maintain it, it shouldn't get in their
way very much either.

Cheers,
Ron

On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 04:48:50PM -0700, Chuan-kai Lin wrote:
> While working my way through emdebian packages, I noticed that the
> debhelper config files of many packages still contain references to
> info files or man pages.  Here are some examples from my notes:
> 
> e2fsprogs: packages contain man pages and info files installed by .files files.
> exoat: FTBFS due to expat.install referring to a man page removed in
> the emdebian packaging.
> file: packages contain man pages installed through .install files.
> ncurses: packages contain man pages installed by .files files.
> pam: FTBFS due to libpam-runtime.files referring to a man page removed
> in the emdebian packaging.
> 
> There may be others that I haven't caught yet.  I propose that we
> systematically remove all entries in /usr/share/doc, /usr/share/man,
> and /usr/share/info from *.install, *.files, and *.links.  We can do
> it to all existing packages in svn, and add this functionality to
> em_make so that it is automatically applied to future packages.
> 
> Comments?
> 
> PS. I will be gone next week, and come back the week after.
> 
> -- 
> Chuan-kai Lin
> 
> 
> -- 
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