Bug#728375: libjetty8-java-doc: Questionable dependencies

[Mauro Molinari]

Il 31/10/2013 14:07, Emmanuel Bourg ha scritto:
> The JDK documentation alone uses about 240 MB. Almost all Java
> documentation packages depend on this, but you have to pay the price
> only once. The dependency is necessary to have nice links between the
> Javadoc of the package specific classes and the Javadoc of the core Java
> classes.

I see, but couldn't these dependencies just be "recommended"?

I know it's a stupid reason, but if you install jetty8 and 
libjetty8-java-doc and you configure Jetty to start, a welcome page for 
Jetty in Debian is deployed in the server instance with a link to the 
Jetty 8 Javadoc. Even if we assume that this link works (I just reported 
another bug for that), it means that to just have that "example webapp" 
working correctly you'll have to download 240 MB of documentation which 
I doubt would even work from within the Jetty instance itself, because 
links to JDK or Servlet Javadocs would point to files outside the Jetty 
8 configured directories (I didn't try, though).

Also, if you just install the jetty8 package without the 
libjetty8-java-doc one, you'll get a default welcome page in Jetty with 
a link to some missing contents (=> the Javadoc documentation, as said). 
This however doesn't justify a strong dependency between jetty8 and 
libjetty8-java-doc just for a simple hyper-linking issue.

Anyway, I'm not so presumptuous to suggest to change a convention used 
for all the Debian packages for javadoc documentation sets, I just 
wanted to give my 2 cents on this.

Mauro