On 07/24/19 10:40, Kent Fredric wrote: > On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 23:56:52 -0400 > desultory <desult...@gentoo.org> wrote: > >> avoid optional documentation, >> while the proposal in question explicitly would > > I assume you meant 'optional dependencies' here right? :) > The user-side effects pf the proposal in question, were it to become policy, would be that anyone seeking to not install what is presently optional documentation would either be: (1) wasting build time and space (and, depending on implementation, dependencies) on their build system (potentially masking the files from being installed); (2) wasting the space in their installed image(s) (if they did not mask the files which would not currently be installed anyway); or (3) wasting their own time working around what the developers would be required by policy to implement by repackaging the software themselves to avoid the time and space drawbacks (though this would generally be expected to be a rather exceptional case, as it would be relatively extreme to avoid what would be a distfile and some file masking from the user side).
Developer-side effects of the proposal in question would explicitly force developers to use bespoke workarounds to avoid adding optional dependencies to packages, for questionable gains. So, while I was commenting on user-side effects, the phrasing applies to developer-side effects given s/documentation/dependencies/. As I have noted elsewhere, there is a solution for which the majority of the tooling exists which could achieve the same ends as the proposal in question without causing developers in general significant additional overhead beyond the status quo, while as a side effect providing additional services to users. However, the proposal in question specifically avoids offloading the newly generated work to automated systems in favor of, evidently, optimizing for maximum consumption of resources with minimal standardization.
