[Pkg-samba-maint] (forw) Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc packages

[Christian Perrier]

----- Forwarded message from Y Giridhar Appaji Nag <appaji at debian.org> -----

Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 17:55:44 +0530
From: Y Giridhar Appaji Nag <appaji at debian.org>
To: debian-devel at lists.debian.org
Subject: Possible mass bug filing: non-doc packages recommending doc
	packages
X-Mailing-List: <debian-devel at lists.debian.org> archive/latest/250787
X-CRM114-Status: Good  ( pR: 60.4576 )

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.

.../...

Debian Samba Maintainers <pkg-samba-maint at lists.alioth.debian.org>
   samba




Currently, swat recommends samba-doc because the "Samba documentation"	
links on SWAT web pages use HTML documentation provided by samba-doc.

I think we could drop this to Suggests.

That would probably need patching the swat home page so that instead of
having:

Samba Documentation
Daemons 
smbd - the SMB daemon 
nmbd - the NetBIOS nameserver 
winbindd - the winbind daemon
.../...

we would have:


Samba Documentation (samba-doc package needed)
Daemons 
smbd - the SMB daemon 
nmbd - the NetBIOS nameserver 
winbindd - the winbind daemon


....or something similar.

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