Ville Skyttä wrote:
On Saturday 24 February 2007, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
For some time I've been working under the assumption that executable
documentation is a bad idea. rpmlint complains when documentation
generates dependencies, and these dependencies are often needless
bloat.
Lately I'm getting pushback when asking for a quick chmod -x of docs.
The usual argument is "It's an example, it's supposed to be
executable." Currently I don't see anything in the guidelines that
would forbid this as long as it doesn't cause extra dependencies.
So, is there concensus that allowing documentation to be executable is
OK? Or is it something that should be prohibited.
I don't see anything wrong with including example scripts etc as executable if
they're useful and can be executed as is and don't result in additional
dependencies.
Note that rpmlint does try to check if a dependency from docs is an additional
one or not and suppresses output if it's not, however it doesn't do any
depsolving which results in some warnings that can be argued to be false
positives. Warnings about doc dependencies such as eg. /bin/sh for any
package, or /usr/bin/perl for things that already require perl(...) can IMO
be ignored.
But the packager needs to keep an eye on possble future package splits etc
which may result in the doc dependency previously indirectly satisfied by
other dependencies in the package no longer resulting in that, and to act
accordingly when/if that happens.
I agree entirely. So long as the packager is aware of the issues
involved and keeps on top of them when updating etc.
Disclaimer: I have at least one package with executable docs, so I'm not
entirely unbiased.
Paul.
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