[defanor]

But at the same time there are modern general purpose systems (Alpine in particular, and Debian when it comes to GNU documentation) that wouldn't even install documentation together with software. Priorities seem to vary quite a bit.

[JdeBP]

That's a red herring. Debian's problems with such documentation were largely the licences that it comes under, often requiring doco to be separately packaged so that it could be placed in the "non-free" section. It is not omitted by default because it is doco. It is omitted by default because the Debian people do not classify it as free content.

[cat199]

sure.

my point is this is the package maintainer interjecting their own notions of what a package is into what is actually provided by the upstream source. the only 'package X' that is 'correct' w/r/t original author is the one that provides exactly what the source based install provides, anything else is maintainer bias. (which isn't inherently bad; just providing a counterpoint as above claim was questioning)