Comment 5 for bug 612222

Uday Reddy writes:
 > Tim, We decide the structure of the *upstream* distribution and
 > leave downstream decisions to downstream. Jonathan (Fedora) and
 > Manoj (Debian) will hopefully tell us the distros' point of view.
 >

I have not disagreed with either of those points. My point is that we should
try to make it as easy as possible for the downstream package maintainers to
do what we would like i.e. include the NEWS file. The current proposal does
the opposite as it will create additional work as they will need to
modify the upstream sources more. Isn't the objective here to get the NEWS
file included in packaged versions?

 > But, from an average Emacs user's point of view, I think the
 > documentation of all Emacs packages should be in one place, modulo
 > version specializations etc. That means that in the upstream
 > distribution it should be in emacs/etc/vm or emacs/site-etc/vm.

From this average Emacs user's point of view, I disagree with creation of
additional directories in the 'public' filesystem hierarchy which are
used by no other package other than VM, particulary when it is for only one or
two files. I also disagree with using etc or site-etc as this use of 'etc' is
not in line with the FSH which specifies etc as a location for configuration
files. The file(s) under discussion are documentation files and should go
under a 'doc' directory.

Whether all emacs package documentation should go in one place or not is a
separate issue to that of getting distro packages to include the NEWS file. I
don't disagree with the idea, but making an ad hoc decision to create
shre/emacs/etc or share/emace/site-etc will do little towards making a
difference.

Have you considered looking into how EPA handles this issue (especially as it
is now part of emacs 24)?

Tim

--
Tim Cross
<email address hidden>

There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they
understand and those who do not understand what they manage.