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Hi Ciaran,

On 3/4/06, Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Explanation: a USE flag for trivial stuff that isn't in /etc, doesn't
> slow anything down, doesn't introduce any dep bloat and generally
> doesn't change anything noticeable isn't a USE flag that's giving the
> user any meaningful choice or making things easier for arch teams. You
> do not get bonus points for using more USE flags.

Another point of view are servers, where there's simply no need to
have docs installed on each and every box in a rack. There's no need
to install what a user doesn't need, and having doc and example USE
flags more widely supported means that Gentoo does a better job of
respecting the choice of users.

Best regards,
Stu

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On Saturday 04 March 2006 17:15, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> Hi Ciaran,
>
> On 3/4/06, Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Explanation: a USE flag for trivial stuff that isn't in /etc, doesn't
> > slow anything down, doesn't introduce any dep bloat and generally
> > doesn't change anything noticeable isn't a USE flag that's giving the
> > user any meaningful choice or making things easier for arch teams. You
> > do not get bonus points for using more USE flags.
>
> Another point of view are servers, where there's simply no need to
> have docs installed on each and every box in a rack. There's no need
> to install what a user doesn't need, and having doc and example USE
> flags more widely supported means that Gentoo does a better job of
> respecting the choice of users.

I agree with Ciaran. IMO the convenience of having docs outweighs the modest
amount of diskspace/clutter they need (average of 50 MB on my average server,
when then rest of the installed packages take at least an order of magnitude
more).

If you're concerned about diskspace you can filter out /usr/share/doc
entirely, so users do have the choice. The problem here is that the docs USE
flag is off by default. Making more packages use the flag would install less
docs. Has anyone actually complained that too many docs are installed by
default? It's true that some users/situations don't need them, but most do,
especially as long as we don't have separate server profiles.

--
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
Fingerprint: DD70 DBF9 E3D4 6CB9 2FDD 0069 508D 9143 8D5F 8951

Stuart Herbert wrote:

> Another point of view are servers, where there's simply no need to
> have docs installed on each and every box in a rack. There's no need
> to install what a user doesn't need, and having doc and example USE
> flags more widely supported means that Gentoo does a better job of
> respecting the choice of users.

Amen. I use FEATURES="noinfo noman nodoc" and USE="-doc" on all of my
server installs. My only desire is that there would be a way to turn them
off more completely - no texinfo, no perl man page generation, etc... I
would also like to have them excluded from binary packages.

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On Saturday 04 March 2006 16:43, Dan Armak wrote:
> If you're concerned about diskspace you can filter out /usr/share/doc
> entirely, so users do have the choice. The problem here is that the docs
> USE flag is off by default. Making more packages use the flag would install
> less docs. Has anyone actually complained that too many docs are installed
> by default? It's true that some users/situations don't need them, but most
> do, especially as long as we don't have separate server profiles.

I have seen quite a few bugs about that and actually have filed one¹, rotting
in bugzilla, myself. I definitely do not care about a few hundred KB
documentation per ebuild, but some install a lot of documentation and
accumulated it's a lot of wasted space. Filtering out /usr/share/doc as a
whole is no choice, when you usually want it, but a fair share not.


Carsten


[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116658

On Saturday 04 March 2006 02:04, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> This is undocumented and unofficial, so feel free to utterly ignore it
> and commit whatever the heck you want.
>
> The 'doc' and 'examples' (yay for consistency!)

Don't now, if I guess right what you want to say, but there's no plural of
documentation afaik. ;p


Carsten

On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 05:43:22PM +0200, Dan Armak wrote:
> Has anyone actually complained that too many docs are installed by
> default?

Don't know about docs, but if examples count here too, see bug #111508.

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On Sat, 4 Mar 2006, MIkey wrote:

> Stuart Herbert wrote:
>
>> Another point of view are servers, where there's simply no need to
>> have docs installed on each and every box in a rack. There's no need
>> to install what a user doesn't need, and having doc and example USE
>> flags more widely supported means that Gentoo does a better job of
>> respecting the choice of users.
>
> Amen. I use FEATURES="noinfo noman nodoc" and USE="-doc" on all of my
> server installs. My only desire is that there would be a way to turn them
> off more completely - no texinfo, no perl man page generation, etc...


> I
> would also like to have them excluded from binary packages.
>

That can't be right can it? You mean, like openoffice-bin, or like the
ones you build yourself? I know that I often build on one system, install
on several, and when I do that, I really want them to be identical. I
think if you have your no-docs-of-any-kind option, you get your wish as to
locally built packages, but if you really mean things like openoffice-bin,
I doubt that any openoffice user would want it with absolutely no
documentation.

Confused,
Ferris
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Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Devrel, Sparc)
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Ferris McCormick wrote:

>> I
>> would also like to have them excluded from binary packages.
>>
>
> That can't be right can it? You mean, like openoffice-bin, or like the
> ones you build yourself? I know that I often build on one system, install
> on several, and when I do that, I really want them to be identical. I
> think if you have your no-docs-of-any-kind option, you get your wish as to
> locally built packages, but if you really mean things like openoffice-bin,
> I doubt that any openoffice user would want it with absolutely no
> documentation.

Yes, if I say -doc or specify FEATURES="nodoc", I don't want the docs in
there, binary package or not. I want the behavior and results to be
consistent. I am not talking about things like the internal openoffice
help documentation, I am talking about anything that goes
into /usr/share/doc, man pages, and info pages.

At my job we aim to eventually rid ourselves completely of MS products on
several thousand (local and remote) desktops and replace them with some
sort of thin linux client running the citrix metaframe client. They will
be running in kiosk mode. No user will have the ability to get to a window
manager and browse around in /usr/share/doc. They don't even know what the
heck a man page is.

Generating package CDs to install the kiosks, using livecds in some cases,
and in other cases using terminal servers are all options on the table. In
each of these scenarios, every KB counts.

I also generate installation CDs that can install or update any server type
in our farm for disaster recovery purposes. Again, every KB counts...

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On Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:04:11 -0600 MIkey <mikey@badpenguins.com> wrote:
| At my job we aim to eventually rid ourselves completely of MS
| products on several thousand (local and remote) desktops and replace
| them with some sort of thin linux client running the citrix metaframe
| client. They will be running in kiosk mode. No user will have the
| ability to get to a window manager and browse around
| in /usr/share/doc. They don't even know what the heck a man page is.

Then you should use INSTALL_MASK, not a USE flag.

--
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Wearer of the shiny hat)
Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

> On Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:04:11 -0600 MIkey <mikey@badpenguins.com> wrote:
> | At my job we aim to eventually rid ourselves completely of MS
> | products on several thousand (local and remote) desktops and replace
> | them with some sort of thin linux client running the citrix metaframe
> | client. They will be running in kiosk mode. No user will have the
> | ability to get to a window manager and browse around
> | in /usr/share/doc. They don't even know what the heck a man page is.
>
> Then you should use INSTALL_MASK, not a USE flag.

Please excuse my ignorance, but what the heck is INSTALL_MASK and where is
it documented? Can it exclude things from being included in binary
packages?

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On Saturday 04 March 2006 18:00, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Saturday 04 March 2006 16:43, Dan Armak wrote:
> > If you're concerned about diskspace you can filter out /usr/share/doc
> > entirely, so users do have the choice. The problem here is that the docs
> > USE flag is off by default. Making more packages use the flag would
> > install less docs. Has anyone actually complained that too many docs are
> > installed by default? It's true that some users/situations don't need
> > them, but most do, especially as long as we don't have separate server
> > profiles.
>
> I have seen quite a few bugs about that and actually have filed one¹,
> rotting in bugzilla, myself. I definitely do not care about a few hundred
> KB documentation per ebuild, but some install a lot of documentation and
> accumulated it's a lot of wasted space. Filtering out /usr/share/doc as a
> whole is no choice, when you usually want it, but a fair share not.

I agree that really large docs should be made USE-dependant. This is also
consistent with Ciaran's orig post.

--
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
Fingerprint: DD70 DBF9 E3D4 6CB9 2FDD 0069 508D 9143 8D5F 8951

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On Sat, 4 Mar 2006, MIkey wrote:

> Ferris McCormick wrote:
>
>>> I
>>> would also like to have them excluded from binary packages.
>>>
>>
>> That can't be right can it? You mean, like openoffice-bin, or like the
>> ones you build yourself? I know that I often build on one system, install
>> on several, and when I do that, I really want them to be identical. I
>> think if you have your no-docs-of-any-kind option, you get your wish as to
>> locally built packages, but if you really mean things like openoffice-bin,
>> I doubt that any openoffice user would want it with absolutely no
>> documentation.
>
> Yes, if I say -doc or specify FEATURES="nodoc", I don't want the docs in
> there, binary package or not. I want the behavior and results to be
> consistent. I am not talking about things like the internal openoffice
> help documentation, I am talking about anything that goes
> into /usr/share/doc, man pages, and info pages.
>

I misinterpreted what you wrote. I thought you meant "physically included
in the package," not "installed from a binary package." I just completely read
what looks like a reasonable request and turned it into nonsense without
thinking about it, I guess.

Regards,
Ferris
- --
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Devrel, Sparc)
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Ferris McCormick wrote:

> I misinterpreted what you wrote. I thought you meant "physically included
> in the package," not "installed from a binary package." I just completely
> read what looks like a reasonable request and turned it into nonsense
> without thinking about it, I guess.

I am not so sure you misinterpreted me, because when I specify -doc and
emerge -B a package, I don't want docs installed OR in the binary package
that is generated. I want the behavior of USE flags to be consistent. If
I set -ssl and generate a binary package for apache2, the packaged up
libraries should not link with ssl libraries. The same should apply with
-doc.

What I would really like is the same capability with info and man pages.
Currently the only way to exclude them is use the unsupported, undocumented
FEATURES="noman noinfo" hack, which if I am not mistaken does not remove
them from binary packages.

Try a du -ksh /usr/share/doc /usr/share/man /usr/share/info and you might
get an idea of why the feature might be desirable:

132M /usr/share/doc
5.7M /usr/share/info
56M /usr/share/man

Most of those are compressed, which means they take even _more_ space in a
binary package. It adds up.

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On Sat, 4 Mar 2006, MIkey wrote:

> Ferris McCormick wrote:
>
>> I misinterpreted what you wrote. I thought you meant "physically included
>> in the package," not "installed from a binary package." I just completely
>> read what looks like a reasonable request and turned it into nonsense
>> without thinking about it, I guess.
>
> I am not so sure you misinterpreted me, because when I specify -doc and
> emerge -B a package, I don't want docs installed OR in the binary package
> that is generated. I want the behavior of USE flags to be consistent. If
> I set -ssl and generate a binary package for apache2, the packaged up
> libraries should not link with ssl libraries. The same should apply with
> -doc.
>

That happens now, I believe. The following should all install the same
thing:
USE='-doc' emerge blah
USE='-doc' emerge -b blah
USE='-doc' emerge -B blah ; emerge -k blah
USE='-doc' emerge blah; quickpkg blah; emerge -C blah; emerge -k blah
Assuming all dependencies are satisfied.
(The binary package is built from the image which is going to be
installed and carries the USE flags with it. If the docs aren't there,
they're not there. Or at least, the binary package carries the '-doc'
use flag along with it so the docs won't be installed.)

What won't install the same is this sequence:
USE='doc' emerge -B blah
USE='-doc' emerge -k blah
'emerge -k' uses the USE flags the package was built with.

Example: Back to ciaranm's original proposal. If I
USE='-doc' emerge -B xorg-x11
I am never going to be able to decide I wanted USE='doc' after all and
pull the docs from the binary package. Documentation for xorg-x11 is in a
separate source file, and with USE='-doc', that file is never even
fetched. So,
USE='doc' emerge -k xorg-x11
cannot install docs. Concrete example (from a live system):
emerge -pkv rubygems
[binary R ] dev-ruby/rubygems-0.8.11 USE="-examples"
USE='examples' emerge -pkv rubygems
[binary R ] dev-ruby/rubygems-0.8.11 USE="-examples"

Or am I still missing something?

> What I would really like is the same capability with info and man pages.
> Currently the only way to exclude them is use the unsupported, undocumented
> FEATURES="noman noinfo" hack, which if I am not mistaken does not remove
> them from binary packages.
>
> Try a du -ksh /usr/share/doc /usr/share/man /usr/share/info and you might
> get an idea of why the feature might be desirable:
>
> 132M /usr/share/doc
> 5.7M /usr/share/info
> 56M /usr/share/man
>
> Most of those are compressed, which means they take even _more_ space in a
> binary package. It adds up.
>

Regards,
Ferris
- --
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Devrel, Sparc)
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On Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:18:22 -0600,
MIkey <mikey@badpenguins.com> wrote:

> Can it exclude things from being included in binary packages?

AFAIK, no. But what you could use (with portage-2.1) is a hook
function in /etc/portage/bashrc:
post_src_install() { rm -rf ${D}usr/share/doc ; }
This way, files will be deleted for real, before getting merged or
added to your binary package.

--
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Thomas de Grenier de Latour wrote:
> post_src_install() { rm -rf ${D}usr/share/doc ; }
> This way, files will be deleted for real, before getting merged or
> added to your binary package.

No, that function never gets executed with binary packages. You probably meant
post_pkg_preinst.

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Kind Regards,

Simon Stelling
Gentoo/AMD64 Member
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On Sat, 04 Mar 2006 23:04:22 +0100,
Simon Stelling <blubb@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Thomas de Grenier de Latour wrote:
> > post_src_install() { rm -rf ${D}usr/share/doc ; }
> > This way, files will be deleted for real, before getting merged or
> > added to your binary package.
>
> No, that function never gets executed with binary packages.

I know, but what i understand from MIkey's email is that he wants to
create some smaller binary packages, without the doc files inside.
Hence the choice of post_src_install.

If it was to do it at pre/post_pkg_preinst time, then INSTALL_MASK
would have done the trick anyway, no need for a hook function.

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On 2006-03-04 20:47, Ferris McCormick uttered these thoughts:
> On Sat, 4 Mar 2006, MIkey wrote:
>
> > Ferris McCormick wrote:
> >
> >> I misinterpreted what you wrote. I thought you meant "physically included
> >> in the package," not "installed from a binary package." I just completely
> >> read what looks like a reasonable request and turned it into nonsense
> >> without thinking about it, I guess.
> >
> > I am not so sure you misinterpreted me, because when I specify -doc and
> > emerge -B a package, I don't want docs installed OR in the binary package
> > that is generated. I want the behavior of USE flags to be consistent. If
> > I set -ssl and generate a binary package for apache2, the packaged up
> > libraries should not link with ssl libraries. The same should apply with
> > -doc.
> >
>
> That happens now, I believe. The following should all install the same
> thing:
> USE='-doc' emerge blah
> USE='-doc' emerge -b blah
> USE='-doc' emerge -B blah ; emerge -k blah
> USE='-doc' emerge blah; quickpkg blah; emerge -C blah; emerge -k blah
> Assuming all dependencies are satisfied.
> (The binary package is built from the image which is going to be
> installed and carries the USE flags with it. If the docs aren't there,
> they're not there. Or at least, the binary package carries the '-doc'
> use flag along with it so the docs won't be installed.)

It seems that INSTALL_MASK works only at merge time, so that if you
build a package at one machine (with INSTALL_MASK set to f.ex.
/usr/share/doc) and install it on the same machine, you get the expected
behaviour. But the INSTALL_MASK:ed directories and their contents are
still present in the binary package since they're not filtered out until
the merge-step. So if you then want to merge this package on a different
machine, and forget to set INSTALL_MASK you still get everything
originally present under /usr/share/doc installed.

One might argue that INSTALL_MASK should apply for
binary-package-building also, but so is not the case at the moment.


Regards,
Patrick Börjesson

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On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 14:16 +0100, Patrick Börjesson wrote:
[snip]

> It seems that INSTALL_MASK works only at merge time, so that if you
> build a package at one machine (with INSTALL_MASK set to f.ex.
> /usr/share/doc) and install it on the same machine, you get the expected
> behaviour. But the INSTALL_MASK:ed directories and their contents are
> still present in the binary package since they're not filtered out until
> the merge-step. So if you then want to merge this package on a different
> machine, and forget to set INSTALL_MASK you still get everything
> originally present under /usr/share/doc installed.
>
> One might argue that INSTALL_MASK should apply for
> binary-package-building also, but so is not the case at the moment.


http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81025

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Gentoo Linux

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On Saturday 04 March 2006 13:18, MIkey wrote:
> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > On Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:04:11 -0600 MIkey <mikey@badpenguins.com> wrote:
> > | At my job we aim to eventually rid ourselves completely of MS
> > | products on several thousand (local and remote) desktops and replace
> > | them with some sort of thin linux client running the citrix metaframe
> > | client. They will be running in kiosk mode. No user will have the
> > | ability to get to a window manager and browse around
> > | in /usr/share/doc. They don't even know what the heck a man page is.
> >
> > Then you should use INSTALL_MASK, not a USE flag.
>
> Please excuse my ignorance, but where is INSTALL_MASK documented?

nowhere of consequence
-mike
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Mike Frysinger wrote:

>> > Then you should use INSTALL_MASK, not a USE flag.
>>
>> Please excuse my ignorance, but where is INSTALL_MASK documented?
>
> nowhere of consequence
> -mike

Heh heh, same place as FEATURES="noinfo noman nodoc" ;)

Let me ask it this way.

Please excuse my ignorance, but where is INSTALL_MASK implemented?

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MIkey wrote:
> Please excuse my ignorance, but where is INSTALL_MASK implemented?

ebuild.sh

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On Sunday 05 March 2006 14:53, MIkey wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> >> > Then you should use INSTALL_MASK, not a USE flag.
> >>
> >> Please excuse my ignorance, but where is INSTALL_MASK documented?
> >
> > nowhere of consequence
>
> Heh heh, same place as FEATURES="noinfo noman nodoc" ;)

not really ... those are documented in make.conf
-mike
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Mike Frysinger wrote:

>> Heh heh, same place as FEATURES="noinfo noman nodoc" ;)
>
> not really ... those are documented in make.conf
> -mike

I have a nasty habit of always looking at make.conf.example instead of the
man page. Plus, er, uh, I used FEATURES="noman" ;) Yeah, thats my story
and I'm sticking to it.

Regardless, I would rather see noman/nodoc/noinfo implemented in USE flags,
so they can be applied package by package, implemented perhaps in something
like dodoc/doman/doinfo/dohtml. In some cases I might actually want
documentation for specific packages...



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