[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#922860: Packages do not contain the upstream README file

[John Marshall]

On 21 Feb 2019, at 15:16, Andreas Tille <andreas at fam-tille.de> wrote:
>> libhts2,
> 
> I do not think that it is necessary in this library package since the
> README does not really contain information which is relevant for users
> who simply install libhts2 as a dependency of other packages.

Agreed -- I was initially going to file this just against libhts-dev, but then got distracted when I filed it against the source package.

>> the badly-named tabix)
> 
> Thanks for the interesting hint.  What better name would you suggest.

I used to imagine distros would call this libhts-utils or similar, as it provides several command-line utilities that are bundled with HTSlib. But perhaps Debian has been shipping a tabix package since the pre-htslib samtools 0.1.x days and would like to keep with that tradition.

>> are missing the upstream release's README file. It would be good to install this file, even though it doesn't currently contain a great deal of salient information. (The upstream release's INSTALL file is also missing, but that is of course appropriate for binary packages.)


I see you've used README*. Do Debian packages get built from an upstream release tarball or from a Git working directory? The results will be different in the two cases, as README.md is omitted from release tarballs.

The original thinking was that README and README.md would contain much the same information (so that the README description would be shown in GitHub repo home pages), and README.md would additionally contain build information specific to building from Git (i.e. instructions to run autoconf etc, which has already been done when starting from a release tarball).

So I was imagining that Debian would add README rather than both README and README.md. However you should do what you see fit, and it may be immaterial if starting from the upstream release tarball as there will be only one file matching README*.

Thanks for responding to this ridiculously quickly!

    John