[Pkg-erlang-devel] Erlang documentation chunks

[Sergei Golovan]

Hi Lukas,

On Mon, Dec 13, 2021 at 2:58 PM Lukas Larsson <lukas at erlang.org> wrote:
>
> Hello!
>
> Since Erlang/OTP 23 it has been possible to build documentation chunks for use by IDE's to fetch documentation about an Erlang function.
>
> I noticed that the debian Erlang packages installs these chunks in /usr/share/doc/erlang-doc/lib/stdlib-*/doc/chunks/.
>
> The EEP (https://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0048#part-1-the-docsstorage) specifies that the files should be located under app/doc/chunks in the source tree, which for debian would mean /usr/lib/erlang/stdlib-*/doc/chunks/.
>
> Can the chunk files be moved to the correct place? And also, I think it would be beneficial for everyone if the chunk files could be installed as part of the erlang-base package instead of the erlang-docs package as then IDEs and similar tools would always have access to them without having to install additional packages.
>

You're right, the chunks are shipped within the erlang-doc package and
are installed into  /usr/share/doc/erlang-doc/lib/*/doc/chunks/ where
* is the library name. But erlang-docs also includes symlink (for
example for stdlib in current stable) /usr/lib/erlang/stdlib-3.14/doc
which points to /usr/share/doc/erlang-doc/lib/stdlib-3.14/doc.

This means that the chunks should become available to IDEs as long as
the erlang-doc package is installed. I don't think that the chunks
should be included into the packages with libraries themselves, as
they should be kept reasonably minimal, suitable for running code, not
developing it. If you develop code, it seems sensible to me to have
documentation installed.

Cheers!
-- 
Sergei Golovan