Re: Upcoming galois release

Hello Paul,

Il giorno mer 26 ott 2022 alle ore 09:43 Paul Wise <[email protected]> ha scritto:
> Perhaps our point of disagreement is the audience for the source
> tarball.

Yes, probably. It seems you look at programs from the perspective of a
big project like Debian, as components in a larger whole. I tend to
look at them as single units and feel that they should be
self-contained and not assume the existence of a particular
infrastructure. From an upstream point of view, for me the tarball is
"the program" and should cater for all use cases.

Maybe also dimensions matter. A structured approach like you suggest
is probably best suited for a larger program. For a simple game like
that, I feel it may be a bit overkill.

> I believe that everything that is not source
> belongs in binary packages only

Agreed, but there may be exceptions. For example, the configure script
is normally shipped within the tarball although it's generated from
configure.ac and thus it's "not source". That's to allow people to
build the program without installing the autotools suite. As I see it,
the argument for shipping html files follows a similar logic.

> > What if one wants to read the doc to learn how to build the package?
>
> Then you install the existing prebuilt -doc binary package,
> or view the existing prebuilt HTML on the upstream website,
> or download a package of prebuilt files from the upstream site,
> or upstream could include a summary in a plain text README in git.

To me, making a separate doc package seems an exaggeration for a
simple program like this. And since I consider the tarball to be "the
program", it shouldn't require you to look for things elsewhere (and
people might have motives for not going online, for example not
everybody in the world has access to fast and cheap internet). And
copying the documentation, or part of it, into the README file looks
like unnecessary duplication (and it might not be as readable in a
plain-text file without markup).

All considered, I believe that adding the html files to the tarball
provides a useful service for users (at least for some of them) at
very little cost, so why not do it.

Gerardo