[CentOS-devel] Broken man pages in vagrant box 1710.01

Mon Dec 11 19:25:08 UTC 2017
Carlos Rodrigues <cefrodrigues at gmail.com>

On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 4:32 PM, aleksander.baranowski
<aleksander.baranowski at yahoo.pl> wrote:
>> Some of the files in the "/usr/share/doc" may be required for
>> compliance with some packages' licensing during distribution. I have
>> no concrete examples of this, it's just something that occured to me.
> I never heard about that, but it might be true.

I've checked Ubuntu and Fedora packaging rules. Both say that packages
must contain license files (in "/usr/share/doc" or as symlinks to
common files for popular licenses). In fact, Fedora's rules for the
cloud image state:

"Use new %license macro to separate license files from documentation,
so the latter can be excluded from container images without stripping
license information which must be included."

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Use_license_macro_in_RPMs_for_packages_in_Cloud_Image

I was actually going to suggest that using "%_netsharedpath
/usr/share/doc" instead of "%_excludedocs 1" (thus leaving man pages
intact, which are just 20MB or so) might be a decent middle ground,
but looking at these rules it seems upstreams want to make sure that
license files are never left out. I didn't find a way to exclude files
using a pattern, only by prefix.

> rpm -qa --queryformat '%{SIZE} %{NAME}\n' | sort -rn
> CentOS comes with linux-firmware Fedora without. This package is about
> 126M when installed. I don't have any knowledge about indispensability
> of this package.

I removed it from a test VM and didn't notice any problems. It may be
necessary for some devices that can be bypassed from the host into the
VM, but I'd be suprised if the emulated virtualbox hardware required a
firmware upload.

C.