On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 7:52 AM, Michael Schwendt mschwendt@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.