MySQL Bugs: #71073: Please create a docs package for rpm based distributions

Bug #71073	Please create a docs package for rpm based distributions
Submitted:	4 Dec 2013 8:57	Modified:	11 Jan 2017 7:00
Reporter:	Simon Mudd (OCA)	Email Updates:
Status:	Closed	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server: Packaging	Severity:	S4 (Feature request)
Version:	5.7.3	OS:	Any
Assigned to:		CPU Architecture:	Any
Tags:	manual

Description:
Given the changelog report in 5.7.3 on http://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/5.7/en/news-5-7-3.html:

"Packaging Notes:
...
For those who wish to continue using the MySQL Reference Manual in Info format, we have made it available at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/."

So documentation is no longer included with the packages. That is not very good (even if many people may not look at this documentation frequently).

How to repeat:
See: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/5.7/en/news-5-7-3.html: (packaging notes).

Unless I've misunderstood it seems you are removing the documentation from the current packages.
That is not ideal.  Online documentation is good of course but we are not always online.

Suggested fix:
Documentation is important and MySQL is a complicated bit of software. Not everyone always has "the internet at hand" to be to browse web pages. Example: internal firewalls or people who travel, so having the documentation in a package installed on the server where the software is running which I can "auto-install" is much better.

I would suggest that you produce a package with these docs in them (maybe too the .pdf files).

Suggested package name: MySQL-docs (old rpm names) or mysql-community-docs (new yum repo).

For your own "distribution", that is the new yum repository and the existing 5.7 packages that you have announced using the MySQL-xxxx naming convention, you distribute these packages, so you should be able without problem to make the docs available for download.

Also if you can include the pdf files (I'd guess both EU A4 and US Paper sizes but I'm not too worried each way). Having the docs at hand if often very convenient.

Note: due to the rpm packaging you do this would be for OS: Linux, and in my case distribution: RHEL or derivates versions 5 and 6.

Thank you for your feature request. Sorry it has taken so long to acknowlegde it.

Hi Simon,

sorry for the very late reply.

To me it seems like this request has be fulfilled already.

Visit this page:

 http://dev.mysql.com/doc/

here you can choose the rpm format download option.

Download and install the rpm (pdf or html format) and
read docs off line.

I think this is a better solution than to duplicate 2x30MB docs packages
in every repo. 

Will this work for you?

The advantage of having things in a single repo is that downloading is from a single location using a common command. That simplifies things for everyone.  I'm sure that's why you moved over to using the yum repo compared to the packages that you can download manually from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/.

To determine if there are updates and pull them down does not require much effort and can be done automatically so I'd still prefer to see the rpm you point at to be in the repo.  Then I don't need to look at the website but can pull down the package automatically.  If necessary point the website at the yum repo ?

Also for 5.7 which is still changing so is the documentation so it's good to have an easy way to update the docs. Even MySQL 5.6 documentation does change somewhat over time so the same thing applies here.

In the end I'd like to see these docs in the repo if that is possible.

Posted by developer:
 
Thanks for the bug report.

We have published the mysql reference manual (pdf/html) rpms to the yum/suse repositories.

Noticed last night in the upstream yum repos.
Thanks.