Following the short discussion on the alias, please vote on approving the following policy: """ Packages must not disable installing manpages via USE flags (e.g. USE=man or USE=doc). If upstream does not ship prebuilt manpages and building them requires additional dependencies, the maintainer should build them and ship along with the package. """ Rationale: manpages are basic documentation for installed software. While additional dependencies are inconvenient for users, not building manpages is harmful. Including (optionally or unconditionally) prebuilt manpages is a good compromise.
yes
yes (I'll CC all eligible voters, arch-team style)
Yes
IIRC there is FEATURES="noman" for that. Also agreed on additional dependencies to build manpages if needed. So, my opinion - yes
williamh, ping.
I find the fact that this is even up for debate incompatible with Gentoo's fundamental tenet of letting the user choose! Upstream has made an effort to allow a choice for the user, and here we are, actively denying the user that choice, for no practical reason!? Coming from bug 890589 where this policy has found a victim and causes unwanted (unneeded), large dependencies to be installed.
(In reply to Cedric Sodhi from comment #8) > I find the fact that this is even up for debate incompatible with Gentoo's > fundamental tenet of letting the user choose! > > Upstream has made an effort to allow a choice for the user, and here we are, > actively denying the user that choice, for no practical reason!? > > Coming from bug 890589 where this policy has found a victim and causes > unwanted (unneeded), large dependencies to be installed. Read comment #0 again: "If upstream does not ship prebuilt manpages and building them requires additional dependencies, the maintainer should build them and ship along with the package." So zathura should not depend on sphinx, but ship pre-built manpages instead.
The bug has been closed via the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/policy-guide.git/commit/?id=bf68ca3759a258a121e05f98b1d20960d8a6a617 commit bf68ca3759a258a121e05f98b1d20960d8a6a617 Author: Ulrich Müller <ulm@gentoo.org> AuthorDate: 2023-01-18 17:27:11 +0000 Commit: Ulrich Müller <ulm@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2023-01-18 17:27:11 +0000 installed-files: Policy against use-conditional manpages Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/689684 Signed-off-by: Ulrich Müller <ulm@gentoo.org> installed-files.rst | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+)
I did not miss that part. But by this policy we demand that the package "MUST" fulfil our idea of what the user needs, and then blame the maintainer for being responsible when the dependencies have to be installed? Because they did not put in enough effort? It just feels wrong in more than one regard.
While this policy overall sounds sensible to me, I guess packages should *not* resort to shipping a prebuilt manpage if such manpage embeds a part of environment used to generate it (like an external template, etc.). In such case the package should instead depend on these external manpage build tools. Otherwise it would be kind-of like shipping a prebuilt binary that embeds some external static library.
