It was recently brought up in a package review
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2006555) that a
Sphinx-generated HTML documentation package contained several JavaScript
libraries, and that:
1. their licenses should be accounted for and added to the License
field for the -doc subpackage
2. they should be treated as bundled libraries and marked with virtual
Provides
Note that the JavaScript is inserted by the Sphinx documentation build
system, and is not present in the source tarball. Your “typical” Sphinx
documentation has minified and unminified copies of JQuery (js-jquery)
and Underscore (js-underscore), both MIT-licensed, plus several
unminified utility libraries that belong to Sphinx itself (doctools.js,
language_data.js, searchtools.js). The overall Sphinx project is
BSD-licensed. The details vary by theme, but this is the most common case.
To me, it seems that this feedback is a reasonable strict reading of the
relevant packaging guidelines. If this is the right interpretation of
Fedora policy, what should be done about it in general?
-----
Based on looking for installed files named “searchtools.js” in packages
named -doc or -docs, there are about 600 documentation packages
generated with Sphinx. This might miss some that have exotic themes.
As far as I can tell, only one existing package in the distribution,
python-murano-package-check, tries to use virtual Provides to track the
libraries that belong to Sphinx itself:
Provides: bundled(js-doctools)
Provides: bundled(js-jquery) = 3.1.0
Provides: bundled(js-searchtools)
Provides: bundled(js-underscore) = 1.3.1
Provides: bundled(js-websupport)
and this package does not actually build its documentation subpackage.
Only the following packages have virtual Provides for js-jquery and
js-underscore. In most cases these lack the version numbers.
- arb-doc
- mpdecimal-doc
- python-BTrees-doc
- python-latexcodec-doc
- python-networkx-doc
- python3-persistent-doc
- sympy-doc
Of the packages in the list above, only mpdecimal-doc has a License
field that seems to try to account for the licenses of the JavaScript
libraries.
-----
Personally, I can add virtual Provides and adjust the License on the
-doc subpackage for my package under review, and it’s even possible for
me to replace the Underscore and JQuery libraries with symbolic links to
those installed by js-jquery and js-underscore. However, changing one
package, or even every package I control, is a tiny drop in a vast ocean
of documentation packages. Consider, for example, that Doxygen also
includes JQuery and several Doxygen-specific libraries in its output, so
the same arguments about licenses and virtual Provides apply to it. A
search for “dynsections.js” in packages named *-doc or *-docs gives
nearly 400 Doxygen-based packages.
If this is a real problem, it seems like it needs to be handled and/or
documented in a way that can potentially scale to the rest of those 600
Sphinx-based packages, to the nearly 400 Doxygen-based packages, and
beyond that to the output of other documentation systems. I am not sure
what that would look like.
All thoughts are welcome.
– Ben Beasley (FAS: music)
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