Hi, Am 19.01.2012 11:50, schrieb Andreas Jaeger:
I just filed feature #313152 - to have a smaller base system which is beneficial for appliances.
Looking at a basic installation (default text server install), I noticed that we have in /usr/share/doc/packages besides the license (which we need to keep) also other files.
An example is glib2, it installs to /usr/share/doc/packages/libglib-2_0-0:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1344 Aug 16 02:51 AUTHORS -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1895792 Oct 14 15:51 ChangeLog -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 25292 Aug 16 02:51 COPYING -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 197710 Oct 14 15:30 NEWS -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9906 Oct 14 15:51 README
I suggest to move everything to the devel package (or a doc package if it exists).
On IRC, Vincent and Sascha suggested to keep README, NEWS (and maybe AUTHORS) in the base package and move only ChangeLog to the devel package. Another idea was to compress these files.
My personal opinion is that the vast majority of our users does not need any of these. Those developers that need it, will get it from the devel/doc packages.
What do you think? Any other ideas on getting a smaller base system?
Note: I don't want to make this a hard rule, more a recommendation.
About your proposal I'd think it makes sense to address packages which have a reasonable amount of docs in size. Means: make sure the maintainer knows there is a lot of docs and let him decide what to do about it. In general I basically agree with Vincent and Sascha that it makes sense to keep files which might be of interest for users (not developers). NEWS, AUTHORS and depending on the package README (if it doesn't contain what would be in INSTALL). So I personally think this needs to be addressed on a case by case base. What would be nice is a list of "offenders" sorted by some priority set by size and likeliness to be used on an appliance just to make sure to get the important ones fixed first. But another thing I was thinking about years ago (I guess I even filed it in bugzilla before I left SUSE but not sure right now): RPM knows --excludedocs. Was that considered to be added as an option to zypp. This sounds like a valid usecase for appliances if someone wants a system as small as possible but accept to lose man pages as well. Wolfgang -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org