Mike Pumford <mpumford%mudcovered.org.uk@localhost> writes: > On 27/10/2020 14:10, Greg Troxel wrote: >> Part of the issues is that when people built packages one at a time, >> MESSAGE was more useful. With bulk installation tools of any kind, as >> are almost universally used (pkgin, pkg_rolling-replace, etc.) MESSAGE >> ends up lost. Thus, I look at each use of MESSAGE as a workaround for a >> bug in upstream docuementation. >> > Not disagreeing with anything you have said here but one thing that I > have noticed when comparing pkgin to FreeBSD's pkg is that pkg > provides a command that can display the MESSAGE file for a package > which is quite a useful thing to have (even for when usage of it is > rare). Could this be an option that pkgin gets? As I understand it, pkgin just calls pkg_add and that prints a ton of stuff including MESSAGE that nobody looks at. pkg_info has had a command to print MESSAGE since ~forever (-D). And, if you have 1000 packages installed and do an update you'll now get probably 50 MESSAGE files (on one system, 58 MESSAGE in 1154 packages). Nobody is going to read all 50 even if pkgin shows them in a clump at the end. And most of them are "how to configure" documentation, not needed on updates. I see this as just part of the larger point that documentation should be installed in the standard place, and that people should look for it there, and would rather work towards not having things in MESSAGE that belong in docs, than to make it eaiser to read MESSAGE.
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