Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Darren Salt]

I demand that Travis Crump may or may not have written...

[snip]
> Popcon suggests only 8% of users are on dial-up [based on package ppp and
> 'votes']

Use of ppp does not imply use of dial-up.

-- 
| Darren Salt  | linux at youmustbejoking | nr. Ashington, | Toon
| Debian GNU/Linux | or ds,demon,co,uk| Northumberland | Army
|   http://www.youmustbejoking.demon.co.uk/progs.packages.html>

The surest way to be late is to have plenty of time.


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Y Giridhar Appaji Nag]

On 09/05/07 17:55 +0530, Y Giridhar Appaji Nag said ...
> I filed a lintian wishlist bug (#527363) requesting a I/W tag when non
> documentation packages recommend documentation packages.
> 
> With Install-Recommends being the default, many packages pull in a lot of
> associated documentation.  These documentation packages are sometimes large
> and could be suggested rather than recommended.  I noticed different opinions
> about such bugs on the BTS (See #504042 that went on to be fixed and #526153
> that was not).  I understand that upstream would sometimes like documentation
> to be installed alongside the binaries, but popcon numbers of -doc packages
> are quite lower the numbers corresponding to the packages that recommend them.
> 
> Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against these
> packages?  I am including a tentative dd-list corresponding to the packages
> [1] that I found after manually removing some packages [2].  I will modify it
> based on suggestions.

Based on the responses, I will not file bugs on all these packages and also
see if my request for lintian check makes more sense if it is refined.

Thank you all for the comments.

Giridhar

-- 
Y Giridhar Appaji Nag | http://people.debian.org/~appaji/


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[David Nusinow]

Y Giridhar Appaji Nag wrote:
> Hi debian-devel,
> 
> From policy 7.2 Binary Dependencies - Depends, Recommends, Suggests, Enhances,
> Pre-Depends
> 
> Recommends
> 
> This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.
> 
> The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together
> with this one in all but unusual installations.
> 
> Suggests
> 
> This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with one or
> more others. Using this field tells the packaging system and the user that
> the listed packages are related to this one and can perhaps enhance its
> usefulness, but that installing this one without them is perfectly
> reasonable.
> 
> I filed a lintian wishlist bug (#527363) requesting a I/W tag when non
> documentation packages recommend documentation packages.
> 
> With Install-Recommends being the default, many packages pull in a lot of
> associated documentation.  These documentation packages are sometimes large
> and could be suggested rather than recommended.  I noticed different opinions
> about such bugs on the BTS (See #504042 that went on to be fixed and #526153
> that was not).  I understand that upstream would sometimes like documentation
> to be installed alongside the binaries, but popcon numbers of -doc packages
> are quite lower the numbers corresponding to the packages that recommend them.
> 
> Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against these
> packages?  I am including a tentative dd-list corresponding to the packages
> [1] that I found after manually removing some packages [2].  I will modify it
> based on suggestions.
> 
> [1] grep-dctrl --pattern="-doc" --field=Recommends --and --not \
> --pattern="-dev" --field=Package --show-field=Package
> [2] Mostly haskell, tcl/tk, texlive and gtk/gnome documentation packages a few
> others like emacs-goodies-el, twisted-doc etc.
> 



> I wonder if I should remove the following packages from the list.
> Debian X Strike Force 
>xorg

I've now begun taking care of this. xorg currently recommends xorg-docs,
which contains several manpages that we consider standard for any X
installation. Unfortunately, it also contains several other docs that
aren't as necessary. What I've just done is uploaded a new version of
xorg-docs to unstable that splits off a new xorg-docs-core package that
contains these manpages. The xorg package in our git repository now
depends on this -core package, and moves xorg-docs to suggests where
it's more appropriate.

Once we upload a new version of xorg, it'll still appear on your scan,
but at that point we'll be considering it a false positive. Thanks for
bringing this to my attention.

 - David Nusinow


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Frank Lin PIAT]

Travis Crump wrote:
> Daniel Burrows wrote:
>> On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 02:58:56PM -0700, Russ Allbery 
>> was heard to say:
 I think that lintian warning is the right way to do it.
>>> I don't -- I think there are too many false positives for a lintian
>>> warning given the thread.  I also think this is fundamentally going in
>>> the wrong direction.  Wouldn't our users expect to get the
>>> documentation
>>> with many of these packages by default?  Normally you do get some
>>> documentation with things, and I've always been surprised by, say, ntp
>>> not including any documentation without installing a separate package.
>>
>>   I agree with this.  I consider installing a program and *not*
>> installing its documentation to be an unusual situation, and if this
>> bug is filed I will treat it as a request to make my packages worse.
>>
>>   aptitude-doc is split out to save archive space and as a feature for
>> users who want to save a few megabytes by removing the user manual, not
>> because I want to force users to jump through hoops to get documentation
>> on their system.
>>
>>   Daniel
>
> If the documentation is something designed to be viewed in a web browser
> and the user has broadband, it is arguably easier to find it on the web.

If the documentation isn't accessible, that should be fixed. (aptidude's
help menu has a link to the text-only version of the documentation,
great).

>  Even knowing precisely where it is[/usr/share/doc/aptitude is it -doc
> or just aptitude, oops I already found it online google aptitude doc
> first result], it is still arguably faster to find it online and once
> you bookmark it is virtually identical.

The documentation published on the web isn't always the same as the version
shipped by Stable.

Franklin


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Mark Allums]

Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote:

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 06:14:34PM -0400, Travis Crump wrote:

If the documentation is something designed to be viewed in a web browser
and the user has broadband, it is arguably easier to find it on the web.
 Even knowing precisely where it is[/usr/share/doc/aptitude is it -doc
or just aptitude, oops I already found it online google aptitude doc
first result], it is still arguably faster to find it online and once
you bookmark it is virtually identical.


You are assuming all our user-base has high-speed broadband Internet access
which is certainly not the case. High speed Internet access is still a luxury
in some countries of the world.

Regards

Javier


Exactly.  Like the U.S.A., for instance.  Millions of people are still 
doomed to dialup, here.


Mark Allums






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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Travis Crump]

Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote:
> On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 06:14:34PM -0400, Travis Crump wrote:
>> If the documentation is something designed to be viewed in a web browser
>> and the user has broadband, it is arguably easier to find it on the web.
>>  Even knowing precisely where it is[/usr/share/doc/aptitude is it -doc
>> or just aptitude, oops I already found it online google aptitude doc
>> first result], it is still arguably faster to find it online and once
>> you bookmark it is virtually identical.
> 
> You are assuming all our user-base has high-speed broadband Internet access
> which is certainly not the case. High speed Internet access is still a luxury
> in some countries of the world.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Javier

Not at all, I wouldn't have mentioned it as a condition if I didn't
realize that some people don't have access to it.  Popcon suggests only
8% of users are on dial-up[based on package ppp and 'votes'] though
admittedly people on dial-up might be less likely to install popcon so
say 20% generously.  20% of users needing something wouldn't seem to
justify a 'recommends'.  I'm not suggesting getting rid of the packages.

Travis


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña]

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 06:14:34PM -0400, Travis Crump wrote:
> If the documentation is something designed to be viewed in a web browser
> and the user has broadband, it is arguably easier to find it on the web.
>  Even knowing precisely where it is[/usr/share/doc/aptitude is it -doc
> or just aptitude, oops I already found it online google aptitude doc
> first result], it is still arguably faster to find it online and once
> you bookmark it is virtually identical.

You are assuming all our user-base has high-speed broadband Internet access
which is certainly not the case. High speed Internet access is still a luxury
in some countries of the world.

Regards

Javier


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Goswin von Brederlow]

Roger Lynn  writes:

> On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 07:00:25PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>> On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 09:47:56PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
>> >   As a practical matter, downgrading these dependencies will cause
>> > aptitude and other package managers to believe that the documentation
>> > is unnecessary and suggest removing it.
>> 
>> Even if the user marked as non-automatic the involved -doc packages?
>> 
>> Anyhow, even if it is the case, I'm tempted to just reply "too
>> bad". The admin will notice that and take it as an occasion for doing
>> a review of which doc she really wants and which she wants not.
>
> As a user, I like being able to mark documentation packages as being 
> automatically installed, so that when I remove the associated packages 
> the package manager will automatically offer to remove the then unneeded 
> documentation packages at the same time. Otherwise there is a good 
> chance the documentation packages will litter the system forever, or at 
> least until I get around to doing a manual cleanup (which might never 
> happen).
>
> I suppose another way around this would be to be able to mark suggested 
> packages as being automatically installed so they could be removed 
> automatically when the suggesting package is removed.
>
> Roger

I think a better solution would be to mark packages as tied to each
other. Foo-doc or foo-data should be marked as tied to foo. That means
as long as foo is installed they will be kept installed. As soon as
foo gets removed they fall under the auto-install rule.

Unlike Depends, Recommends, Suggests this would be purely a users
choice. For example you could tie autotools-dev and devscripts to
build-essential.

MfG
Goswin


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Travis Crump]

Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 02:58:56PM -0700, Russ Allbery  was 
> heard to say:
>>> I think that lintian warning is the right way to do it.
>> I don't -- I think there are too many false positives for a lintian
>> warning given the thread.  I also think this is fundamentally going in
>> the wrong direction.  Wouldn't our users expect to get the documentation
>> with many of these packages by default?  Normally you do get some
>> documentation with things, and I've always been surprised by, say, ntp
>> not including any documentation without installing a separate package.
> 
>   I agree with this.  I consider installing a program and *not*
> installing its documentation to be an unusual situation, and if this
> bug is filed I will treat it as a request to make my packages worse.
> 
>   aptitude-doc is split out to save archive space and as a feature for
> users who want to save a few megabytes by removing the user manual, not
> because I want to force users to jump through hoops to get documentation
> on their system.
> 
>   Daniel
> 
> 

If the documentation is something designed to be viewed in a web browser
and the user has broadband, it is arguably easier to find it on the web.
 Even knowing precisely where it is[/usr/share/doc/aptitude is it -doc
or just aptitude, oops I already found it online google aptitude doc
first result], it is still arguably faster to find it online and once
you bookmark it is virtually identical.

Travis


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Russ Allbery]

Peter Eisentraut  writes:
> On Saturday 09 May 2009 00:58:56 Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Wouldn't our users expect to get the documentation with many of these
>> packages by default?  Normally you do get some documentation with
>> things, and I've always been surprised by, say, ntp not including any
>> documentation without installing a separate package.

> We currently have that ntp suggests ntp-doc.  Should that be changed to 
> recommends?

I don't know that I'm really the person to ask, since I'm kind of on the
inside and I don't have a very good feel for what the average user
expects.  I find it slightly surprising that ntp-doc isn't recommended
by ntp, but on the other hand, I rarely use the documentation so it
probably saves me disk space.

> Perhaps a better policy or developer reference type guideline can come
> out of this thread about what kind of package should or should not
> depend on documentation in what way.  It is kind of idiosyncratic that
> we insist on man pages being provided in a very specific way but are
> completely lax about other kinds of documentation, even if the latter
> might be the primary way to learn about a particular package's
> functionality.

Yeah, that's part of the thought that was going through my head as well.

It feels to me like recommending documentation is often the right thing
to do.  Systems with space constraints can disable automatic
installation of recommends (we do routinely on all of our servers).

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 10:39:21AM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 06:55:43PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli 
>  was heard to say:
> > I don't think that the mere fact that we changed the default behavior
> > of apt-get/aptitude should get in the way of that maintainer's
> > choice. If we used to live in a world where, by maintainer choice, doc
> > was not installed by default, that world should IMO stay the same.
>
>   aptitude's behavior was "changed" in 2001.

Yes, but back then a very tiny teeny slice of our user base was
probably using aptitude. The usage of aptitude became, probably,
common practice when we started recommending its usage in the release
notes. Popcon stats for aptitude support this theory, and I'm
confident yours other feedback mechanisms as the maintainer do the
same.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Daniel Burrows]

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 06:55:43PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli  
was heard to say:
> I don't think that the mere fact that we changed the default behavior
> of apt-get/aptitude should get in the way of that maintainer's
> choice. If we used to live in a world where, by maintainer choice, doc
> was not installed by default, that world should IMO stay the same.

  aptitude's behavior was "changed" in 2001.  It was changed because
Recommends has always meant that the package manager should
automatically select the recommended package when the recommending
package was selected.

  Daniel


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Daniel Burrows]

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 02:58:56PM -0700, Russ Allbery  was 
heard to say:
> > I think that lintian warning is the right way to do it.
> 
> I don't -- I think there are too many false positives for a lintian
> warning given the thread.  I also think this is fundamentally going in
> the wrong direction.  Wouldn't our users expect to get the documentation
> with many of these packages by default?  Normally you do get some
> documentation with things, and I've always been surprised by, say, ntp
> not including any documentation without installing a separate package.

  I agree with this.  I consider installing a program and *not*
installing its documentation to be an unusual situation, and if this
bug is filed I will treat it as a request to make my packages worse.

  aptitude-doc is split out to save archive space and as a feature for
users who want to save a few megabytes by removing the user manual, not
because I want to force users to jump through hoops to get documentation
on their system.

  Daniel


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Daniel Burrows]

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 06:49:38PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli  
was heard to say:
> On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 09:47:56PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> >   As a practical matter, downgrading these dependencies will cause
> > aptitude and other package managers to believe that the documentation
> > is unnecessary and suggest removing it.
> 
> Even if the user marked as non-automatic the involved -doc packages?

  No, but I doubt more than a handful of users have done this.

> Also, I see no other way of doing that transition ... Do you have any
> aptitude-fu suggestion? :)

  $ aptitude unmarkauto "~n-doc$"

  Daniel


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Peter Eisentraut]

On Saturday 09 May 2009 00:58:56 Russ Allbery wrote:
> Wouldn't our users expect to get the documentation
> with many of these packages by default?  Normally you do get some
> documentation with things, and I've always been surprised by, say, ntp
> not including any documentation without installing a separate package.

We currently have that ntp suggests ntp-doc.  Should that be changed to 
recommends?

Perhaps a better policy or developer reference type guideline can come out of 
this thread about what kind of package should or should not depend on 
documentation in what way.  It is kind of idiosyncratic that we insist on man 
pages being provided in a very specific way but are completely lax about other 
kinds of documentation, even if the latter might be the primary way to learn 
about a particular package's functionality.


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Roger Lynn]

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 07:00:25PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 09:47:56PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> >   As a practical matter, downgrading these dependencies will cause
> > aptitude and other package managers to believe that the documentation
> > is unnecessary and suggest removing it.
> 
> Even if the user marked as non-automatic the involved -doc packages?
> 
> Anyhow, even if it is the case, I'm tempted to just reply "too
> bad". The admin will notice that and take it as an occasion for doing
> a review of which doc she really wants and which she wants not.

As a user, I like being able to mark documentation packages as being 
automatically installed, so that when I remove the associated packages 
the package manager will automatically offer to remove the then unneeded 
documentation packages at the same time. Otherwise there is a good 
chance the documentation packages will litter the system forever, or at 
least until I get around to doing a manual cleanup (which might never 
happen).

I suppose another way around this would be to be able to mark suggested 
packages as being automatically installed so they could be removed 
automatically when the suggesting package is removed.

Roger


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Ben Finney]

Steve Langasek  writes:

> On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 11:31:05AM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> > That seems like a good reason to go through this exercise.
> 
> No. Figure out which packages actually should be changed, *then* file
> bugs.

By “this exercise” I'm referring to the discussion here in
debian-devel in order to find out which packages need this MBF against
them.

-- 
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  `\  Separatist Movement!” —wiredog, http://kuro5hin.org/ |
_o__)  |
Ben Finney


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Steve Langasek]

On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 11:31:05AM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> Wouldn't this MBF shake out which packages actually have good reason for
> a strong (i.e. pulled-in-by-default-package-tool-behaviour) dependency
> relationship to their docs from those that do not?

At the expense of the time of maintainers who have to close these garbage
bugs.

> That seems like a good reason to go through this exercise.

No.  Figure out which packages actually should be changed, *then* file bugs.

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Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/
slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Ben Finney]

Steve Langasek  writes:

> Yes, and the MBF proposal *doesn't* take into account packages that
> previously *did* have a hard dep on their doc packages and only
> demoted it to a Recommends: once the default behavior changed.
> 
> Cf.  swat, samba-doc.

Wouldn't this MBF shake out which packages actually have good reason for
a strong (i.e. pulled-in-by-default-package-tool-behaviour) dependency
relationship to their docs from those that do not? That seems like a
good reason to go through this exercise.

-- 
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  `\   assailed by truth.” —John Kenneth Galbraith, 1989-07-28 |
_o__)  |
Ben Finney


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Russ Allbery]

Neil Williams  writes:

> In which case, the MBF could concentrate more on libraries and other
> packages that have -doc packages rather than on
> applications. Libraries that Recommend: libfoo-doc (as mine did and
> which I'll fix in the next upload) could conceivably be bringing in
> the docs not when someone is debugging the library itself (when the
> docs are useful) but when someone is debugging a reverse dependency -
> quite possibly for a bug that doesn't relate to the functionality
> provided by the library.

Hm, that's a good point.  libfoo-dev recommending libfoo-doc makes a lot
of sense to me, but libfoo1 shouldn't be recommending a *-doc package.

-- 
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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Russ Allbery]

Giacomo Catenazzi  writes:
> Y Giridhar Appaji Nag wrote:

>> Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against
>> these packages?  I am including a tentative dd-list corresponding to
>> the packages [1] that I found after manually removing some packages
>> [2].  I will modify it based on suggestions.

> I think that lintian warning is the right way to do it.

I don't -- I think there are too many false positives for a lintian
warning given the thread.  I also think this is fundamentally going in
the wrong direction.  Wouldn't our users expect to get the documentation
with many of these packages by default?  Normally you do get some
documentation with things, and I've always been surprised by, say, ntp
not including any documentation without installing a separate package.

> As we see, there are a lot of "false positives", so an eventual mass
> bug filling will require a lot of manual check before filling the bug
> (yes, I think the main task in this case should be on the reporter,
> not on the maintainer).

If there are too many false positives for a mass bug filing, there are
probably too many false positives for a Lintian check.

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Frank Küster]

Neil Williams  wrote:

> On Fri, 08 May 2009 11:59:27 +0200
> Frank Küster  wrote:
>
>> Frank Lin PIAT  wrote:
>> 
>> > The development documentation for libraries and programming languages
>> > should not be installed by the runtime.
>> >
>> > This probably means that packages like perl, python, texlive... should
>> > provide a $foo, $foo-doc and $foo-runtime (or -bin, or lib$foo, or
>> > whatever). Other package that needs to depend on that tool should then
>> > depend on $foo-runtime.
>> 
>> How could we separate texlive-$foo and texlive-$foo-runtime? 
>> 
>> And would it make any sense? While many people install python just
>> because an application they want needs the interpreter, users don't
>> usually install a TeX system because something needs it - but because
>> they want to right texts.
>
> Not true, I have

Very true, had I written what I had in mind: s/users/most users/. 

>> Only in the special case of software documentation does it happen that
>> the documentation is completely written, and the "user" (developer or
>> buildd) just needs the "runtime".
>
> Umm, we have a lot of people writing and building software
> documentation in things like docbook 

And that's good, but it's still a special case. 

Instead of discussing doc or nodoc, it would be much more valuable if
someone could tell us which LaTeX packages are really needed by docbook
and similar documentation systems, so that we could taylor a minmal
package for that - without a doc dependency.

Regards, Frank
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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Don Armstrong]

On Thu, 07 May 2009, Y Giridhar Appaji Nag wrote:
> From policy 7.2 Binary Dependencies - Depends, Recommends, Suggests, Enhances,
> Pre-Depends
> 
> Recommends
> 
> This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.
> 
> The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together
> with this one in all but unusual installations.

This determination is necessarily a judgement call, and is kind of up
to the maintainer. If you run across specific instances of packages
where the documentation Recommends appears gratuitous, filing wishlist
bugs with specific rationale that would be convincing to the
maintainer is reasonable, but it shouldn't be a mass filing. Frankly,
if I were you, I'd restrict myself to particularly large -doc packages
which are pulled in by packages with high popcon scores to start with,
at least.

> With Install-Recommends being the default, many packages pull in a
> lot of associated documentation. These documentation packages are
> sometimes large and could be suggested rather than recommended.

In cases where you actually care about the size of the documentation,
you're presumably being extra careful about the packages which are
Recommends:, and probably aren't installing them automatically.


Don Armstrong

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 06:55:43PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 10:14:05AM +0200, Frank Lin PIAT wrote:
> > While I support the effort to reduce disk space usage, I strongly
> > disagree with this proposal.

> > A software is worth nothing without appropriate documentation.

> No, that's subjective, with the subject being the package
> maintainer. If the maintainer considered the software "worth nothing"
> without doc, he could have (in the past) marked the -doc package as
> *dependency* as that was the only way in the past to have it installed
> by default.

Yes, and the MBF proposal *doesn't* take into account packages that
previously *did* have a hard dep on their doc packages and only demoted it
to a Recommends: once the default behavior changed.

Cf.  swat, samba-doc.

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Josselin Mouette]

Le jeudi 07 mai 2009 à 17:55 +0530, Y Giridhar Appaji Nag a écrit :
> Debian GNOME Maintainers 
>devhelp (U)

False positive. A documentation browser is useless without documentation
to browse.

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 10:14:05AM +0200, Frank Lin PIAT wrote:
> While I support the effort to reduce disk space usage, I strongly
> disagree with this proposal.
> 
> A software is worth nothing without appropriate documentation.

No, that's subjective, with the subject being the package
maintainer. If the maintainer considered the software "worth nothing"
without doc, he could have (in the past) marked the -doc package as
*dependency* as that was the only way in the past to have it installed
by default.

I don't think that the mere fact that we changed the default behavior
of apt-get/aptitude should get in the way of that maintainer's
choice. If we used to live in a world where, by maintainer choice, doc
was not installed by default, that world should IMO stay the same.

That is why I interpret the spirit of the proposal, and that is why
I'm in favor of it.

Just my 0.02€,
Cheers.

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 09:47:56PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
>   As a practical matter, downgrading these dependencies will cause
> aptitude and other package managers to believe that the documentation
> is unnecessary and suggest removing it.

Even if the user marked as non-automatic the involved -doc packages?

Anyhow, even if it is the case, I'm tempted to just reply "too
bad". The admin will notice that and take it as an occasion for doing
a review of which doc she really wants and which she wants not.

Also, I see no other way of doing that transition ... Do you have any
aptitude-fu suggestion? :)

Cheers.

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Carsten Hey]

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 04:06:47PM +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote:
> Daniel Burrows  (07/05/2009):
> >   As a practical matter, downgrading these dependencies will cause
> > aptitude and other package managers to believe that the documentation
> > is unnecessary and suggest removing it.
>
> So that one has a chance to notice possibly unneeded doc? Works for me.

You don't need to wait for these dependencies to be changed to notice
possibly unneeded docs:

deborphan -n --guess-doc | grep -- '-doc$'

The need to grep for doc packages for this use case can be avoided after
a option to ignore libraries has been be added to deborphan, which will
happen when tags replace sections in Debian or, if requested, earlier.


Carsten


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Cyril Brulebois]

Daniel Burrows  (07/05/2009):
>   As a practical matter, downgrading these dependencies will cause
> aptitude and other package managers to believe that the documentation
> is unnecessary and suggest removing it.

So that one has a chance to notice possibly unneeded doc? Works for me.

Mraw,
KiBi.


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Hendrik Sattler]

Zitat von Neil Williams :

I rarely write TeX but I write a lot of docbook and expect to be able
to convert that to PDF when necessary - without needing to care about
how that happens or how to write TeX myself.


Well, you might as well use the FO output and use fop to convert to  
PDF. This implies that you use docbook XML.


HS



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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Norbert Preining]

On Fr, 08 Mai 2009, Neil Williams wrote:
> TeX docs should only be installed on systems where users need to write
> TeX - any dependencies that bring in TeX docs merely to support

Come on. That we do NOT install the docs by default is already a
concession. We could stop this discussion and I kill all the -doc
pakcages and include the doc files unconditionally into the packages,
due to the requirements of the LPPL.

Do you prefer that?

The bottom line is that *without* user interaction the documentation
files *HAVE*TO*BE*INSTALLED*. Full stop.

>From the LPPL:
/---
| 2.  You may distribute a complete, unmodified copy of the Work as you
| received it.  Distribution of only part of the Work is considered
| modification of the Work, and no right to distribute such a Derived
| Work may be assumed under the terms of this clause.
\---

Best wishes

Norbert

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Neil Williams]

On Fri, 08 May 2009 11:59:27 +0200
Frank Küster  wrote:

> Frank Lin PIAT  wrote:
> 
> > The development documentation for libraries and programming languages
> > should not be installed by the runtime.
> >
> > This probably means that packages like perl, python, texlive... should
> > provide a $foo, $foo-doc and $foo-runtime (or -bin, or lib$foo, or
> > whatever). Other package that needs to depend on that tool should then
> > depend on $foo-runtime.
> 
> How could we separate texlive-$foo and texlive-$foo-runtime? 
> 
> And would it make any sense? While many people install python just
> because an application they want needs the interpreter, users don't
> usually install a TeX system because something needs it - but because
> they want to right texts.

Not true, I have various texlive packages installed on systems where
I've never needed to write anything in TeX. I do use latex-beamer on
some systems but one other systems where latex-beamer is not used,
texlive is primarily brought in by docbook-utils, even if I don't need
the TeX parts of docbook-utils. Converting docbook to HTML doesn't need
TeX - only the conversion to PDF-type. We have docbook-xsl and others
for those situations where packages use docbook conversions to HTML at
build-time but docbook-utils is still useful.

Even then, there is no need for someone using docbook2pdf to understand
or even refer to the TeX documentation. Any TeX errors when converting
from docbook to PDF via TeX are a bug in the tool doing the conversion
to TeX, the user cannot be expected to care as long as their docbook
syntax is correct. TeX is not the "source" for that conversion, it is a
step-along-the-way and, as such, does not deserve to have the TeX docs
installed.

TeX docs should only be installed on systems where users need to write
TeX - any dependencies that bring in TeX docs merely to support
converting some other format into TeX as a step to TeX converting that
on to yet another format, IMHO *must not* mandate that the TeX docs are
also installed. texlive needs to make this possible for packages like
docbook-utils. That, to me, means splitting the texlive runtime out
from the docs.

I rarely write TeX but I write a lot of docbook and expect to be able
to convert that to PDF when necessary - without needing to care about
how that happens or how to write TeX myself. Please support
docbook-utils having a dependency *just* on the TeX runtime and not
requiring the TeX docs. The bug in that dependency chain is in
texlive-base which has "Depends: texlive-doc-base" - in the context of
'apt-get install docbook-utils', that is entirely unwarranted.

> Only in the special case of software documentation does it happen that
> the documentation is completely written, and the "user" (developer or
> buildd) just needs the "runtime".

Umm, we have a lot of people writing and building software
documentation in things like docbook 

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Michael Hanke]

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 08:58:51AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Fri, 8 May 2009, Christian Perrier wrote:
>
>> I bringed the discussion in out maintenance list but dropping
>> Recommends to Suggests is likely to make us provide a "broken" home page
>> for SWAT by default. We could of course patch SWAT so that the page
>> explicitely says that adding samba-doc is needed but that would be
>> glightly ugly.
>>
>> So, that could be seen as a quite calid use case, indeed..:)
>
> As a raw estimation about 50% of the packages I maintain / sponsor use
> the doc package not only as pure standalone doc but the doc might be
> used by the help system of the native program / web application.  You
> might argue that in this case the program should be called *-data, but
> I'd call this nitpicking because the packages in itself are perfectly
> valid doc packages and make sense on their own.  So I do not think that
> this issue is really atarget for mass bug filing because chances for
> false positives are to high.  I'm fine with a lintian warning which
> can be overriden by the maintainer in case he decides recommending the
> doc package is the reight way to go.

+1

and this is what I will do for 'fsl' and 'fslview', since the
corresponding doc packages provide the online-help of the respective
applications -- even though these are plain html files that perfectly
fit into a separate doc package.


Michael

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Frank Küster]

Frank Lin PIAT  wrote:

> The development documentation for libraries and programming languages
> should not be installed by the runtime.
>
> This probably means that packages like perl, python, texlive... should
> provide a $foo, $foo-doc and $foo-runtime (or -bin, or lib$foo, or
> whatever). Other package that needs to depend on that tool should then
> depend on $foo-runtime.

How could we separate texlive-$foo and texlive-$foo-runtime? 

And would it make any sense? While many people install python just
because an application they want needs the interpreter, users don't
usually install a TeX system because something needs it - but because
they want to right texts.

Only in the special case of software documentation does it happen that
the documentation is completely written, and the "user" (developer or
buildd) just needs the "runtime".

Regards, Frank
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Debian Developer (TeXLive)
VCD Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg, ADFC Miltenberg
B90/Grüne KV Miltenberg


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Neil Williams]

On Fri, 8 May 2009 08:58:51 +0200 (CEST)
Andreas Tille  wrote:

> On Fri, 8 May 2009, Christian Perrier wrote:
> 
> > I bringed the discussion in out maintenance list but dropping
> > Recommends to Suggests is likely to make us provide a "broken" home page
> > for SWAT by default. We could of course patch SWAT so that the page
> > explicitely says that adding samba-doc is needed but that would be
> > glightly ugly.
> >
> > So, that could be seen as a quite calid use case, indeed..:)
> 
> As a raw estimation about 50% of the packages I maintain / sponsor use
> the doc package not only as pure standalone doc but the doc might be
> used by the help system of the native program / web application. 

In which case, the MBF could concentrate more on libraries and other
packages that have -doc packages rather than on applications. Libraries
that Recommend: libfoo-doc (as mine did and which I'll fix in the next
upload) could conceivably be bringing in the docs not when someone is
debugging the library itself (when the docs are useful) but when
someone is debugging a reverse dependency - quite possibly for a bug
that doesn't relate to the functionality provided by the library.

It is helpful for applications to be able to load the Help file - as
long as there is a useful message to the user should the -doc package
not be installed for any reason.

> You might argue that in this case the program should be called *-data, but
> I'd call this nitpicking because the packages in itself are perfectly
> valid doc packages and make sense on their own.  So I do not think that
> this issue is really atarget for mass bug filing because chances for
> false positives are to high.  I'm fine with a lintian warning which
> can be overriden by the maintainer in case he decides recommending the
> doc package is the reight way to go.

lintian is probably the best option - a lintian check can also
probably handle the distinction between a library -dev package and an
application package and the 'Certainty' functionality can deal with
corner-cases.

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Frank Lin PIAT]

On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 17:55 +0530, Y Giridhar Appaji Nag wrote:
> 
> I filed a lintian wishlist bug (#527363) requesting a I/W tag when non
> documentation packages recommend documentation packages.

While I support the effort to reduce disk space usage, I strongly
disagree with this proposal.

A software is worth nothing without appropriate documentation.
When Joe User installs a package, the documentation should be installed
as well, automatically (i.e "apt-get install perl" install the whole
upstream package).

In my opinion, the "main" package logically Depends on the -doc package,
but the actual dependency header is downgraded to Recommend so system
admin can choose to not install it.

I think it would be much nicer to file a bug against APT so the user can
choose to not install "Recommend" dependencies that sits in section
"doc". [APT maintainers will hate me here]

> With Install-Recommends being the default, many packages pull in a lot
> of associated documentation.  These documentation packages are
> sometimes large and could be suggested rather than recommended.  I
> noticed different opinions about such bugs on the BTS (See #504042
> that went on to be fixed and #526153 that was not).

Regarding the perl-doc (Bug #504042), I believe it's a different story.

The development documentation for libraries and programming languages
should not be installed by the runtime.

This probably means that packages like perl, python, texlive... should
provide a $foo, $foo-doc and $foo-runtime (or -bin, or lib$foo, or
whatever). Other package that needs to depend on that tool should then
depend on $foo-runtime.

>   I understand that upstream would sometimes like documentation to be
> installed alongside the binaries

Upstream want it because it's sensible for their (and our) users.

> but popcon numbers of -doc packages are quite lower the numbers
> corresponding to the packages that recommend them.

Don't make popcon statistics lie.

The reason why -doc popcon is much lower than associated package is
because -doc are "recommended" and Debian-installer's tasksel don't
install recommend packages. IIRC

> Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against
> these packages?  I am including a tentative dd-list corresponding to
> the packages[1] that I found after manually removing some packages[2].
> I will modify it based on suggestions.

Regards,

Franklin


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, 8 May 2009, Christian Perrier wrote:


I bringed the discussion in out maintenance list but dropping
Recommends to Suggests is likely to make us provide a "broken" home page
for SWAT by default. We could of course patch SWAT so that the page
explicitely says that adding samba-doc is needed but that would be
glightly ugly.

So, that could be seen as a quite calid use case, indeed..:)


As a raw estimation about 50% of the packages I maintain / sponsor use
the doc package not only as pure standalone doc but the doc might be
used by the help system of the native program / web application.  You
might argue that in this case the program should be called *-data, but
I'd call this nitpicking because the packages in itself are perfectly
valid doc packages and make sense on their own.  So I do not think that
this issue is really atarget for mass bug filing because chances for
false positives are to high.  I'm fine with a lintian warning which
can be overriden by the maintainer in case he decides recommending the
doc package is the reight way to go.

Kind regards and thanks for the effort anyway

  Andreas.

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Giacomo Catenazzi]

Y Giridhar Appaji Nag wrote:

> I filed a lintian wishlist bug (#527363) requesting a I/W tag when non
> documentation packages recommend documentation packages.
(...)
> 
> Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against these
> packages?  I am including a tentative dd-list corresponding to the packages
> [1] that I found after manually removing some packages [2].  I will modify it
> based on suggestions.

I think that lintian warning is the right way to do it.

As we see, there are a lot of "false positives", so an eventual mass bug filling
will require a lot of manual check before filling the bug
(yes, I think the main task in this case should be on the reporter, not
on the maintainer).

ciao
cate


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Christian Perrier]

Quoting Y Giridhar Appaji Nag (app...@debian.org):

> Debian Samba Maintainers 
>samba


swat Recommends: samba-doc

swat is a web interface to administer samba. Its main page currently
has links to Samba documentation in HTML.

I bringed the discussion in out maintenance list but dropping
Recommends to Suggests is likely to make us provide a "broken" home page
for SWAT by default. We could of course patch SWAT so that the page
explicitely says that adding samba-doc is needed but that would be
glightly ugly.

So, that could be seen as a quite calid use case, indeed..:)




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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Daniel Burrows]

  As a practical matter, downgrading these dependencies will cause
aptitude and other package managers to believe that the documentation
is unnecessary and suggest removing it.

  Daniel


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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Luca Falavigna]

Y Giridhar Appaji Nag ha scritto:
> Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against these
> packages?  I am including a tentative dd-list corresponding to the packages
> [1] that I found after manually removing some packages [2].  I will modify it
> based on suggestions.
> 
> Luca Falavigna 
>drpython

Fixed in SVN, will appear in the next upload.
Thank you! :)

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Neil Williams]

On Thu, 7 May 2009 17:55:44 +0530
Y Giridhar Appaji Nag  wrote:

> Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against these
> packages?  I am including a tentative dd-list corresponding to the packages
> [1] that I found after manually removing some packages [2].  I will modify it
> based on suggestions.

> Debian QOF packaging team 
>qof

I'll fix that in the next upload, no need for a bug report.

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Frank Küster]

Y Giridhar Appaji Nag  wrote:

> I filed a lintian wishlist bug (#527363) requesting a I/W tag when non
> documentation packages recommend documentation packages.

That might be a good idea. However, for the texlive packages, we'll just
add lintian overrides.

> With Install-Recommends being the default, many packages pull in a lot of
> associated documentation.  These documentation packages are sometimes large
> and could be suggested rather than recommended.  I noticed different opinions
> about such bugs on the BTS (See #504042 that went on to be fixed and #526153
> that was not).  I understand that upstream would sometimes like documentation
> to be installed alongside the binaries, 

For many parts of texlive, the license requires binary distributions to
be complete. This is why we refused to create separate doc packages for
a long time in the past. We have only separated the doc packages after
Recommends became installed by default.

At least that's how I recall the order of events; I might be wrong, but
I think the argument holds nevertheless: We can do the splitting of the
docs only because it takes a deliberate action to get rid of them, just
as anyone receiving a "complete binary distribution" is able to rm -rf
the doc directory.

> Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against these
> packages?

We'll just add wontfix tags, so you might as well not bother to file the
bugs against the texlive packages.

Regards, Frank
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Debian Developer (TeXLive)
VCD Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg, ADFC Miltenberg
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Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Y Giridhar Appaji Nag]

Hi debian-devel,

From policy 7.2 Binary Dependencies - Depends, Recommends, Suggests, Enhances,
Pre-Depends

Recommends

This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.

The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together
with this one in all but unusual installations.

Suggests

This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with one or
more others. Using this field tells the packaging system and the user that
the listed packages are related to this one and can perhaps enhance its
usefulness, but that installing this one without them is perfectly
reasonable.

I filed a lintian wishlist bug (#527363) requesting a I/W tag when non
documentation packages recommend documentation packages.

With Install-Recommends being the default, many packages pull in a lot of
associated documentation.  These documentation packages are sometimes large
and could be suggested rather than recommended.  I noticed different opinions
about such bugs on the BTS (See #504042 that went on to be fixed and #526153
that was not).  I understand that upstream would sometimes like documentation
to be installed alongside the binaries, but popcon numbers of -doc packages
are quite lower the numbers corresponding to the packages that recommend them.

Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against these
packages?  I am including a tentative dd-list corresponding to the packages
[1] that I found after manually removing some packages [2].  I will modify it
based on suggestions.

[1] grep-dctrl --pattern="-doc" --field=Recommends --and --not \
--pattern="-dev" --field=Package --show-field=Package
[2] Mostly haskell, tcl/tk, texlive and gtk/gnome documentation packages a few
others like emacs-goodies-el, twisted-doc etc.

I wonder if I should remove the following packages from the list.

  devhelp
  education-common
  education-electronics

Daniel Leidert (dale) 
   docbook-xsl

Hideki Yamane (Debian-JP) 
   mirmon

Salvador Abreu 
   gprolog

Bill Allombert 
   gap

Thorsten Alteholz 
   mpb

Henrik Andreasson 
   pike7.6 (U)

Daniel Baumann 
   apcupsd
   dvdisaster
   wmii
   wmii2

Dominique Belhachemi 
   z88

Luciano Bello 
   imagemagick (U)

Hilko Bengen 
   sepia

Philipp Benner 
   python-biopython (U)
   wise (U)

Jay Berkenbilt 
   vips

Jan Beyer 
   bibus (U)

W. Martin Borgert 
   snacc
   snacc (U)

Raphael Bossek 
   python-4suite

Fathi Boudra 
   qt4-x11 (U)
   qtcreator (U)

Joachim Breitner 
   xmonad

Ludovic Brenta 
   gnat-gps

Thomas Bushnell, BSG 
   gnucash
   lilypond

Daniel Burrows 
   aptitude

Antal A. Buss 
   python-simpy

Stefano Canepa 
   spe (U)

Hubert Chathi 
   asymptote

Pierre Chifflier 
   esvn

Christian Holm Christensen 
   root-system

Isaac Clerencia 
   phppgadmin

Jesus Climent 
   dspam (U)

Peter Collingbourne 
   ladr

Arnaud Cornet 
   webgen0.4

Julien Cristau 
   xorg (U)

Debian DSPAM Maintainers 
   dspam

Debian Edu Developers 
   debian-edu

Debian GGZ Maintainers 
   meta-ggz

Debian GIS Project 
   gmt

Debian GNOME Maintainers 
   devhelp (U)

Debian Multimedia Team 
   ocp (U)

Debian OCaml Maintainers 
   omake

Debian Python Modules Team 
   pymilter (U)
   quixote (U)

Debian QOF packaging team 
   qof

Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers 
   koffice
   qt4-x11
   qtcreator

Debian Ruby Extras Maintainers 

   libtioga-ruby (U)

Debian Samba Maintainers 
   samba

Debian Science Maintainers 
   bibus
   eprover

Debian Science Team 
   debian-science
   scilab

Debian Scientific Computing Team 
   parmetis

Debian X Strike Force 
   xorg

Debian XML/SGML Group 
   docbook-xsl (U)

Debian-Med Packaging Team 
   emboss-explorer
   python-biopython
   tree-puzzle
   wise

Debian/Ubuntu Zope Team 
   zope3

Yann Dirson 
   sgml2x

Sebastian Dröge 
   devhelp (U)

Dirk Eddelbuettel 
   gretl

Peter Eisentraut 
   meta-ggz (U)
   phppgadmin (U)

Luca Falavigna 
   drpython

Bartosz Fenski 
   dibbler (U)

Martín Ferrari 
   camstream

Gilles Filippini 
   nted

Morten Werner Forsbring 
   debian-edu (U)

Decklin Foster 
   mnemosyne-blog

Vincent Fourmond 
   libtioga-ruby

picca frederic 
   lisaac

Mike Furr 
   omake (U)

Bdale Garbee 
   gnuradio
   sdcc (U)
   sdcc-nf (U)

Francisco Garcia 
   drgeo

Stephane Glondu 
   omake (U)

Debian QA Group 
   tkgate
   tla
   u++

Gudjon I. Gudjonsson 
   sdcc
   sdcc-nf

Aurélien GÉRÔME 
   lisaac (U)
   scilab (U)

Christoph Haas 
   dspam (U)
   pdns (U)
   pdns-recursor (U)

Yaroslav Halchenko 
   fslview (U)

Michael Hanke 
   fsl
   fslview

Magnus Holmgren 
   pike7.6

Mark Hymers 
   kst

ImageMagick Packaging Team 
   imagemagick

Adam C. Powell IV 
   parmetis (U)

Steffen Joeris 
   debian-edu (U)

Matthew Johnson 
   libcsv-java

Timo Jyrinki 
   malaga

Kurt B. Kaiser 
   dspam (U)
   gambc

Scott Kitterman 
   pymilter

Matthias Klose 
   zope3 (U)

Daniel Kobras 
   dx
   imagemagick (U)

Noèl Köthe 
   samba (U)

Aurelien Labrosse 
   d