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

[Andreas Tille]

Hi John,

On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 03:42:00PM +0000, John Marshall wrote:
> 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.

OK.
 
> >> 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.

Well, we can just keep that suggestion.  If we will rename tabix to
libhts-utils (what else than tabix should be contained here?) this
package can "Provides: tabix" for compatibility and upgrades.
 
> >> 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 package is from the release tarball.  However, since I have very
frequently seen that README files were renamed to README.md files later
I tend to keep the packaging flexible about this kind of renames.
 
> 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*.

As you say since the tarball just contains README the result will be
that this single file will be installed. :-)
 
> Thanks for responding to this ridiculously quickly!

My intention is to maintain as best as possible cooperation to our
upstreams and beeing quick and responsive is part of this.  It will
not always work that fast, but at least we try hard.

Kind regards

       Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de