Audacious

It's a mistake in the openSUSE packages, IMO.

By default, Audacious installs some files and images to ${datadir}/audacious/, and the packager must not (re)move the files without adjusting paths built in into the program. It could install the text files into ${docdir}/audacious/ instead, but the images would stay below $datadir, and there would be little benefit, since internally it would need to handle a second dir from which to load files.

The Fedora packages don't alter the paths, but add several documentation files to the distribution's per-package docdir, i.e. /usr/share/doc/audacious/ for Fedora 20 and newer. That AUTHORS and COPYING files get duplicated is harmless.

$ rpmls audacious|grep /usr/share/audacious/
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/AUTHORS
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/COPYING
drwxr-xr-x  /usr/share/audacious/images
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/about-logo.png
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/album.png
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/audacious.png
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/audio.png
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/connectivity.png
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/info.png
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/menu_playlist.png
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/menu_plugin.png
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/menu_queue_toggle.png
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/playlist.png
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/images/plugins.png

$ rpmls audacious|grep AUTH
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/audacious/AUTHORS
-rw-r--r--  /usr/share/doc/audacious/AUTHORS

$ rpm -q audacious
audacious-3.4.1-2.fc20.x86_64

I agree with what Michael said. If openSUSE has a different opinion about the proper location of those files, I'm willing to discuss that. But moving them in the packaging without even mentioning it to upstream is plain wrong, discourteous, and (as you've noticed) likely to break things.

Bart Hollis wrote:

Been with openSuse for years now, so the /usr/share/doc/packages/<application> path seems correct to me.

Oh, and also: how long you have been using a distribution has no effect on whether they are "correct" on any given issue.