[Proj] preferred documentation

[Greg Troxel]

Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> writes:

> Greg Troxel wrote:
>> I'm the maintainer of the pkgsrc entries for proj and associated
>> documentation.
>>
>> So, I wonder if the 4 old files should be moved to old_docs, the new
>> ones promoted, and proj-pdf-docs-1.1.tar.gz created with the 4 new
>> files.  (I say 1.1 because pkgsrc has called the old file 1.0 for want
>> of a version number.)

> I'm not sure now why I was differentiating between the "old" and "new"
> pdf files.  I have blown away the old ones, and promoted the files from
> the new_docs directory into the main directory.  I also blew away
> proj-pdf-docs.tar.gz and created a proj-pdf-docs.zip with the new pdfs.

Getting rid of the old sounds just fine.

Could you rename the file to proj-pdf-docs-1.1.zip?  While I realize
many people who just download and read them don't care if there's a
version, packaging systems need a version number.  If you don't
provide one, they have to make one up, and then numbers will be
inconsistent across systems and could even go backwards if you ever
assign a number in the future.  Also, someone might reasonably expect
that proj-pdf-docs.zip is the same content as proj-pdf-docs.tar.gz,
just bundled differently, but that's not true.

I suggest 1.1 only because pkgsrc previously called the unnumbered
documentation 1.0.  Perhaps in the future there will be a merge/update
if someone finds enough Copious Spare Time.

Packaging systems are also sensitive to changing the contents of a
file without changing the version number; they typically record hashes
of files and have local caching of fetched "distfiles".

It would be nice to have a proj-pdf-docs-1.1.tar.gz, too, to avoid
forcing unzip as a dependency.  I realize that you wish to provide a
zip so that Windows users won't have to be able to deal with tar and
gzip, and with docs in .tar.gz also they'd match the sources.

Sorry if I'm seeming difficult -- as a packaging system maintainer
I've found that these seemingly minor points make a difference in both
the amount of effort and the quality of result over time.

Thanks for your work maintaining the distribution; I recently used
proj to convert from WGS84 to Massachusetts state place (NAD1983) for
plotting tracks on MassGIS orthophotos.

    Thanks,
    Greg

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