Bug#879049: debian-policy: Clarify how nodoc is to be used with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS & DEB_BUILD_PROFILES

On Wed, Apr 01, 2026 at 04:47:23PM -0400, Jeremy Bícha wrote:
> I'm retitling this bug. Debian Policy 4.7.4 now has minimal
> documentation of DEB_BUILD_PROFILES. It only specifically describes
> nocheck and noinsttest.
> 
> Since nodoc is mentioned in the DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS section, I think
> it's important that Debian Policy be clear about how to use nodoc.
> Debian Policy provides some examples of DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS and
> DEB_BUILD_PROFILES but it's missing a nodoc example.

More to the point:

Several months ago I made the experiment of building the archive with
the nodoc build profile, with the intention of reporting bugs (with
whatever severity would be appropriate).

The problem: I found more than 950 packages which FTBFS with
nodoc profile. For the curious:

https://people.debian.org/~sanvila/build-logs/nodoc-20251010/

Because I expected a lot less, I never announced any MBF anywhere.

Now I wonder if this nodoc profile is something that every package is
supposed to support, or maybe it would make sense to have some opt-out
or opt-in mechanism, like a field in debian/control, to indicate
whether or not the nodoc build is supported for such package.

[ In my opinion, with current tools, forcing all packages to support
  nodoc would be overkill ]

Thanks.