On 4/4/25 08:36, Greg Troxel wrote:
Content that belongs in upstream documentation, e.g. because it is useful
to someone building and using the software from upstream sources, should be
submitted upstream. It may be placed in files/README.pkgsrc but should be
marked as belonging upstream.
There is one thing I'm unhappy with that. Having things in README.pkgsrc is definitely better than having nothing at all, but without a support from pkg_info, those files would be terribly hard to find. So I believe we should not delete MESSAGEs until we have some kind of infrastructure support.
One of the examples that come to my mind is sysutils/open-vm-tools, whose MESSAGE explains how to get it properly work on non-Linux platforms. In an ideal world where NetBSD is (at least) as popular as Linux, upstreams would surely make every effort to ensure their software run smoothly on NetBSD. But in reality, even if I submitted a NetBSD-specific usage guide (actually non-Linux-specific guide in this case) to the upstream, I cannot expect them to accept it or even keep it in their documentation in the future.
Another example is audio/musicpd whose MESSAGE explains, again, how to get it work on NetBSD. The NetBSD in-kernel audio mixer, by default, does not allow multiple users to open the same audio device simultaneously. This is probably good for security but MPD really needs this restriction to be disabled. Upstream should document this, sure, but in reality it's not exactly reasonable to expect them to do that.