Subject: Re: deduplicating jquery/

From: Wookey <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2020 21:29:43 +0000

I was just updating a package and got the using lintian grumbling that
javadoc has added 1.3MB of jquery to my package (almost doubling its
installed size).

There are 5 of these on my system (I'm surprised its not more
actually, surely some people must have tens or hundreds of these as
both doxygen and javadoc do this?).

Having read #903428 I see there is no enthusiasm for fixing this in
the tooling. And also that I am not the only person coming across this
and wondering what to do about it. I've had this experience before
with both doxygen and javadoc and have spent some years assuming that
someone will sort this out eventually.

Whilst I agree that having a local jquery in each such set of docs is
not that big a deal, do we not potetially end up with an awful lot of
them across the distro so maybe it is worth taking more seriously? If
it really is only 5 on everyone's machines then I guess we can live
with that.

Given that the maintainers of both javadoc and doxygen have declared
this "wontfix" should we not at least stop lintian complaining about
it? Unless the project disgrees with the maintainers decisions here it
seems perverse to continue to mark this as an issue.

And also at least document some dh runes for doing the necesarry
symlinking to use the system copy so that packagers can just find the
"standard solution" and use that without having to read a great long
bug report, find that everyone has thrown up their hands, and write
pleading mails :-) (Acompanied by a note about the practical risk of
incompatible version changes over time - I know I don't know how much
I should worry about that in practice (given that my inclination is to
use the system version, because I'm much more bothered about the
duplication than the problem that the search function in the API docs
for an obscure package might stop working one day ...)

This feels like the sort of makework we used to be better at dealing
with. Am I just getting grumpy in my old age?

Perhaps there are docs for packagers on this somewhere, in which case can
someone reply so they are in the bug report. Cheers.

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/

---

From: Craig Small <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2020 10:02:29 +1100

Hi,
  WordPress has a bunch of these dependencies which float in and out of
lining up between what Debian has and what upstream WordPress uses. As an
added bonus, they sometimes slightly adjust their copies.
I use lintian overrides and dh-linktree and this helps, but the result is
less than good and often just means WordPress ships with its own copies of
javascript libraries.

It makes me rather sad, but fixing it would cost a lot of time (and also
what Russ said, which was a good summary of the problem) so I don't see a
good solution.
But if you ever find one, I'll gladly update WordPress to use it :)

 - Craig