Hello.

There has been some talk in the forums about the merits and flaws of stripping out the info/doc pages from packages ( http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=31299&p=1 for more information, I don't want to reconstruct all of the arguments here). I made a suggestion there and was recommended to post it here.

With a small change to the makepkg script, it is possible for it to add the names of packages it strips to a list. If we were to have a list of packages that had optional documentation it would be much easier for users to write info PKGBUILDs for these packages, such as we already have for ggc, binutils, and coreutils.

What would be required is for developers who maintain packages in the repo to set a flag in their makepkg.conf. The flag would simply inform makepkg to track which packages were stripped. I have written a proof-of-concept patch, which I will attach here.

The only part I haven't quite worked out logistically is getting the file list combined between developers, and publishing it online. Fortunately, those are rather small problems as the patch for makepkg is already written, and would only need slight modification once an accepted solution was created.