Chapter 12. Documentation

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12.2 Info documents

Info documents should be installed in

/usr/share/info

. They should be compressed with

gzip  9

.

Your package should call

install info

to update the Info

dir

file in its

postinst

script

when called with a

configure

argument, for example:

install info   quiet   section Development Development \

/usr/share/info/foobar.info

It is a good idea to specify a section for the location of your program; this is done with the

  section

switch. To determine which section to use, you should look at

/usr/share

/info/dir

on your system and choose the most relevant (or create a new section if none

of the current sections are relevant). Note that the

  section

flag takes two arguments; the

first is a regular expression to match (case insensitively) against an existing section, the second

is used when creating a new one.

You should remove the entries in the

prerm

script when called with a

remove

argument:

install info   quiet   remove /usr/share/info/foobar.info

If

install info

cannot find a description entry in the Info file you must supply one. See

install info(8)

for details.

12.3 Additional documentation

Any additional documentation that comes with the package may be installed at the discre 

tion of the package maintainer. Text documentation should be installed in the directory

/usr

/share/doc/

package

, where package is the name of the package, and compressed with

gzip

 9

unless it is small.

If a package comes with large amounts of documentation which many users of the package

will not require you should create a separate binary package to contain it, so that it does not

take up disk space on the machines of users who do not need or want it installed.

It is often a good idea to put text information files (

README

s, changelogs, and so forth) that

come with the source package in

/usr/share/doc/

package

in the binary package. How 

ever, you don't need to install the instructions for building and installing the package, of

course!

Packages must not require the existence of any files in

/usr/share/doc/

in order to function

3

. Any files that are referenced by programs but are also useful as stand alone documentation

none exists, and moves knowledge into man's database that would be better left in the file system. This support is

therefore deprecated and will cease to be present in the future.

3

The system administrator should be able to delete files in

/usr/share/doc/

without causing any programs

to break.