[Pkg-mpd-maintainers] Bug#954362: ncmpc documentation should be split out

[kaliko]

Hi

Thanks for your report Daniel,

20/03/2020 , Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> ncmpc pulls in a bunch of javascript packages, which i think are just to
> render the documentation:

Right.

20/03/2020 , Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> Since ncmpc is good for use in a lightweight (non-graphical)
> environment […]
> I recommend either moving ncmpc documentation to a separate package, or
> making these dependencies into Recommends instead.

Here is a bit of context regarding documentation as a separated package.

When we took over maintenance I did split the documentation in a dedicated package. But
in order to have the package in time for Buster release we decided not to split the
package. Here is the original message :

06/01/2019 , Florian Schlichting wrote:
> - building a new binary package ncmpc-doc will cause the upload to go to
>   NEW for ftp-master approval. This may take several weeks and carries a
>   high risk of missing buster. My advice is to not split off the
>   documentation - not now because of release timing, but also more
>   generally because it's not actually that big (123k installed). In fact
>   I think the ncmpc-lyrics package should be re-integrated with ncmpc
>   (the additional changelog.Debian.gz is twice the size of all the
>   plugins together) but I suggest to do this after the buster release.

The reason for shipping documentation (and lyrics plugin as well) in a separated package
is not only a matter of size but also the extra dependencies it pulls.

ncmpc-doc (html only)      168k
libjs-sphinxdoc            144k
   ↘ libjs-jquery          746k
       ↘ javascript-common  70k
   ↘ libjs-underscore      302k
TOTAL                     1400k

In case of ncmpc-lyrics it's worse since it pulls the ruby interpreter (15M for libruby
alone).

Here are my propositions.

 * Keep ncmpc-lyrics a separated package

Either
  1) Move ${sphinxdoc:Depends} to Recommends (as suggested by Daniel)
  2) Disable HTML build altogether ("html_manual=false" build option)

I'm in favor of 2). Actually the html documentation is nothing more than the html
version of the man page. As Daniel mentioned ncmpc targets lightweight (non-graphical)
environment (and advanced users), the regular manual is enough IMHO.

I'll update the package in a couple of week.

Please comment if you think we should do otherwise or if I forgot something.

Cheers
k

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