On Thursday 09 March 2006 15:00, Robert Bauck Hamar wrote:
*Mark Rosenstand: | One of the principles of design in CRUX is to remove junk files. | Files that you'll only (if ever) read once are, IMO, junk. Since | CRUX is source based, you already have a local copy of the source | in case you want the license info.
I recently installed some KDE programs, and I was a little bit annoyed when the help functions in the programs didn't work because the help files were missing. Of course, I can just remove the «rm helpfiles» line from the Pkgfile, but I don't believe this was the intention of removing junk files.
Me neither in this specific case. That's why I detailed my description of junk as "files you'll only (if ever) read once" - e.g. licenses, README's, etc. The KDE documentation is more of a lookup which is nicely integrated with the applications, but what's worse: not all is (to my knowledge) available online.
I have also used other systems, where there often is an overfilled /usr/share/doc directory, or something like that. This dir often has manuals in PDF or some other format. These manuals can usually be retrieved from the Internet when needed. Info is also a format I really hate to deal with, and projecs providing info manuals, usually has it on the Internet as HTML files. I agree with Per that man pages should be kept, because they let you find useful information fast, and because they are standard on *nices.
Files that programs use when they run, on the other hand, are not junk, but an unmanageable forest of manuals in different formats is.
If documentation is nicely integrated with the application, as it's the case with KDE, it isn't junk in my world either. Could we get a comment (and maybe even action) from the KDE maintainer/packager? :-)