Re: Override disparity
Jörg Sommer <joerg@alea.gnuu.de> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>> I prefer putting them in the same section as the main package so that
>> people browsing by section in aptitude will actually see them.
> I don't like this philosophie. This way packages end up in libs they
> don't include any lib:
> % dpkg -s opensyncutils | grep \^Sec
> Section: libs
Agreed, libs probably has to be a special case. For library-only
packages, I'd put the documentation in libdevel, since it's generally only
of interest to exactly the same audience as the -dev package.
> For tools like deborphan it is really hard to detect unneeded packages
> and suggest them for removal. But in another discussion someone
> suggested to drop the section model and use debtags for sorting the
> packages.
I think that's a better idea for detecting unused doc packages, yes. Doc
packages are unlike, say, library -dev packages in that it's not that
unusual for users to install only the docs and not the actual package when
they're exploring something.
>> But documentation is frequently just what new users want, and new users
>> are the ones who frequently won't know to look in some other section or
>> use apt-cache to search for a separate doc package.
> But packages with documentation are named foo-doc with places them in a
> sorted list behind the package foo. They should see them. And foo
> should suggest foo-doc.
If you put it in a different section, the standard package management
tools that I'm familiar with (dselect, aptitude) will *not* show the
package foo-doc next to foo by default. I know you can switch to a
flattened view, but I doubt many users do that.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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