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Re: Request from Debian packagers: please don't ship debian/ in tarballs



On Wednesday 25 May 2005 11.22, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> Le Mercredi 25 Mai 2005 10:17, Lauri Watts a écrit :
> > The majority of the debian man pages are either  the output of
> > help2man (heck, we could pretty much automate that, but what's the
> > point), or say little more than "this is kfoo, it's part of KDE"  
> > For an excellent
> > example : /svn/kdemultimedia/debian/man/juk.1 - what, really, is the
> > point of that?   I am not nearly as certain as you seem to be, that
> > man pages are an unconditionally valuable addon to KDE packages.
> >  Well written, useful ones, yes.  Boilerplate not so much.
>
> we agree with that, and if you take a look at our svn repository
> ( svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-kde/branches/kde-3.4.0/ ) that holds the
> debian/ dirs we use to package KDE modules, you'll see that we dropped
> all those default manpages that are useless.
>
> We prefer to have no man page (even if that's incorrect wrt debian
> policy) than a stupid empty default manpage.

Well, I'm glad to see sanity rearing it's head there :)  

> our point is, we would like to see the debian/ dirs be pruned of the kde
> release tarballs. That's all. Nothing force the KDE team to delete from
> the svn, and personnaly I don't see why they should be removed if some
> things in there have value for anyone. But there is no reason to ship
> them in the tarballs, and like Adeodato said, it does more harm than
> good.

They're only useful to anyone else if they're shipped, and if they're not 
being shipped, or updated, there is really no point having them there at all.  
All they are is dead weight for most of us, just as much as our FreeBSD 
packaging files were back in the day when those were in the repo.

Since Ben takes objection to my characterisation of some of the man pages, 
let's leave them out of the equation. I will mark up and add to the KDE repo 
all the ones still left in the modules he mentioned (which I note was 
something that had already been started.)

Given that, I'll ask again what I asked yesterday: Excluding the man pages 
this time, if the rest of them are out of date, and possibly break builds, 
you are happy with your own repo, and they are not to be shipped, isn't this 
a good time to take the debian directories out of the KDE repo?  What use 
would it be to leave them there?

Regards,
-- 
Lauri Watts
KDE Documentation: http://docs.kde.org
KDE on FreeBSD: http://freebsd.kde.org

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