On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 7:52 AM, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
After many years, there still is the occasional packager, who adds
an explicit "Requires: %{name} = %{version}-%{release}" to a noarch -doc
subpackage which contains files one can display with any suitable program
(such as PDF, HTML or TXT files).
I don't know why they do it. The "Requiring Base Package" guidelines
leave enough freedom to not do it and even mention -libs subpackages as one
example where the base dep is not "needed":
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Requiring_Base_Package
What do other packagers think about this?
Depends on the software. Documentation in
/usr/share/doc/[name]-docs-[version] should not be a problem. But as a
theoretical example, having having tomcat6 and tomcat7 both use
/ur/share/tomcat-docs would get nasty, and dangerous. So it does
require a bit of thought as to whether multiple versions of the same
component could have multiple versions of documentation installed,
safely, in parallel.