Debian package with GNU manuals (was: Re: [ELPA] New package c-intro-and-ref)

[Max Nikulin]

On 11/12/2024 11:32, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>    > > How about if we make ALL the GNU manuals available in one place
>    > > as .deb packages, for the same of people with Debian-nased distros?
>
>    > At least installed to /usr/share/info, they will cause conflicts with
>    > native Debian packages.
>
> Would you please flesh out that sketchy statement?  For instance,
> give me an exaple of such a conflict, and what circumstances
> would cause it to occur?  Which Debian packages might conflict with
> a package that contains only a GNU manual?

Am I right that you are going to put e.g. coreutils and gnupg manuals in 
this package?

Perhaps it is possible to avoid installing dedicated native Debian 
packages with manuals, e.g. bash-doc, emacs-common-non-dfsg and 
org-mode-docs, but I would still prefer to have manual versions matching 
binaries. Another issue is that Debian packages may provide .pdf and 
.html file in addition to .info ones.

The main problem is that some packages contain both important tools and 
manuals for them:

dpkg -L coreutils gzip gnupg findutils | grep -F .info.gz
/usr/share/info/coreutils.info.gz
/usr/share/info/gzip.info.gz
/usr/share/info/gnupg.info.gz
/usr/share/info/find-maint.info.gz
/usr/share/info/find.info.gz

So you need to use some tricks if the new GNU package would contain e.g.
/usr/share/info/coreutils.info.gz
otherwise dpkg would fail in the case of install attempt.

By the way, why additional manuals obtained from net must be namely 
*installed*? Perhaps info browser may *cache* them in a temporary 
directory. Of course, nothing prevent users from downloading important 
manuals to a "persistent" directory.

--
P.S.
In my taste missed lines with citation attribution makes it harder to 
follow the discussion.