Re: Choosing not to install documentation

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Kirk, Alfred,

* Alfred M. Szmidt wrote on Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 11:12:37PM CEST:
>    Under certain circumstances, users don't want to install *any*
>    documentation files from my project.
> 
> I'm not sure what those conditions are, or why it is a good idea to
> make live hard for users;

Why should providing more choice make lives hard for those that have the
choice?

> but isn't it easier to just do `rm -rf
> /usr/share/doc /usr/share/man' after `make install'?

And thereby remove installed documentation for hundreds of other,
unrelated packages?

I think you meant
  rmdir /usr/share/doc /usr/share/man

but even that is problematic: those directories might have existed
beforehand, and the user might want them to continue to exist (with
permissions and owner she created them with) even if she doesn't want
to install this package's documentation.

With Automake 1.11, you can avoid both the directories being created and
files being installed by setting the respective installation directory
variables to empty.  I guess in your case that would be something like

  if INSTALLDOCS
  MAYBEDOCS = doc
  dist_doc_DATA = README
  else
  docdir =
  endif
  SUBDIRS = src $(MAYBEDOCS)

(untested).

But say, you aren't looking for 'make install-exec' perchance, to
install only architecture-dependent files?

Cheers,
Ralf