Bug#1089110: [PATCH] Document that packages cannot require man / info / locale files
Bill Allombert wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 05, 2024 at 10:13:24AM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote:
>> Package: debian-policy
>> Version: 4.7.0.1
>> Severity: wishlist
>> Tags: patch
>> X-Debbugs-Cc: josh@joshtriplett.org
>>
>> Packages already tend to avoid requiring any files from /usr/share/man
>> or /usr/share/info, and don't require files in /usr/share/locale if
>> running in a C or C.UTF-8 locale.
>>
>> The attached patch documents this in Policy, so that it's explicitly
>> supported for sysadmins to use dpkg exclusions or similar mechanisms to
>> delete /usr/share/doc, /usr/share/info, and /usr/share/locale.
>
> You mean /usr/share/man
Yes, I did. Good catch; will fix.
>> To the best of my knowledge, this documents existing behavior, and will
>> not introduce any new bugs on any packages.
>
> Well, I would like to see some hard evidence.
> For example, is it OK to build Debian packages on such systems?
>
> What is a graceful failure for some script is a crash for another...
I would be happy to reduce the expectations of the language here; when I said "gracefully" here, the only case I had in mind was "doesn't fail silently" (e.g. just exiting or having a menu item silently fail, without showing any message).
I would also be happy to reduce this to a "should". I can certainly offer anecdata to the effect that I haven't observed any issues on such systems in a long time. But we could also make it a "should" for a while, and see if anyone observes issues and reports bugs. I think there's enough anecdata on this to support a move to "should", which gives people leave to report *normal* bugs, and see how that goes.
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