Documentation in the RPM files for RedHat 4.2

[David Masterson <david batcave bungi com>]

I'm currently working on installing Red Hat 4.2 from the PowerTools CD onto my
home system.  In doing so, I'm naturally reading a lot of documentation in the
/usr/doc area.  My biggest complaint about that documentation is that, while
it contains a lot of good documentation about each package as done by the
original developers, there usually is no documentation about how the package
was set up under Red Hat.  Many of the programs, for instance, assume an
installation in /usr/local as done by 'configure'.  More importantly, there is
little or no documentation as to why an RPM chose to install itself in a
certain way (where it was installed can be queried by `rpm -ql`, but why it
was installed there...).  This would go a long way to help answering about the
overall design of the RedHat distribution (like the following):

* Why does the logrotate config file for UUCP specifically say to leave its
logs uncompressed while the others are compressed?
* Doesn't the 'less' distribution include a script that can be used with
LESSOPEN to enable it to handle compressed or gzipped files?
* What assumptions were made in the installation of INN and will they work in
a UUCP-only installation?
* What are the assumptions overall in the installation of RedHat?  Are they
oriented toward a system on a network or a home system?
* While there is a "redhat" cf file for sendmail, what went into the design of
that cf file and what assumptions does it make?
* Why doesn't netcfg support CHAP in setting up PPP?  Is there a proper method
to "enhance" netcfg's output without messing up netcfg?
* If Python (or TCL or Perl) is going to be used to make things like the
Control Panel easier to understand, couldn't they be commented better?

Am I missing something obvious?

-- 
David Masterson
david batcave bungi com