Re: Bug#759186: debian-policy: please consider adding "nodoc" as a possible value for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS to policy
Hi Russ Allbery,
>> I know policy is not about mandating implementation details, but
>> maintainers do find the specific examples in §4.9.1 to be useful -- it
>> would be good if a practical pointer on how nodoc could be implemented
>> by the maintainer were included as part of this change. At the very
>> least, a warning about what might need to be done to pull this off would
>> be worthwhile.
>
> I would really like to bail on this for right now. I agree with what
> you're saying, but there are apparently some 300 packages in the archive
> that are using this successfully, and the goal here is to document
> existing practice. In the long run, this will probably be replaced with
> build profiles, so we'll have an opportunity to revisit and add more
> useful information. There currently aren't any tools for Policy to point
> people at.
>
> If we were to modify the proposed language along these lines, I would lean
> towards adding the warning and making it clearer that implementing this
> option is strictly optional, just to keep people from naively attempting
> too hard to implement the target.
I completely agree. At this stage, a simple note that additional work may be
needed to correctly deal with dh_install* in particular is fine for now.
Encouraging standardisation around "nodoc" rather than "nodocs" and
standardising what that keyword means (emptyish packages and not missing
packages) is an important task for more immediate consideration.
cheers
Stuart
--
Stuart Prescott http://www.nanonanonano.net/ stuart@nanonanonano.net
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/ stuart@debian.org
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