Re: Bug#2182: perl shouldn't touch /usr/local
On Fri, 19 Jan 1996, Michael E. Deisher wrote:
> An example of this is fvwm / X (I don't remember exactly which package
> was to blame). Recently, the package changed maintainers and all the
> fvwmrc's on my system broke because they relied on having
> /usr/local/bin in the default path. The most recent maintainer hadn't
> bothered to add /usr/local/bin since it was not in the upstream
> package sources / config files.
I think this case is slightly out of the ordinary, in that when I took
over X there were no Debianised sources - the Debian packages had been
constructed from the binaries distributed by the XFree86 people. In
building the new packages I tried to make as few modifications to both
the configuration scripts provided by the XFree86 people and by the
previous version of the Debian X packages while correcting the more
obvious errors and omissions. /usr/local/bin was an oversight, which I
corrected as soon as it was pointed out to me.
> Do we have an official policy on this? Of course, one person's
> "bug-fix" may be another person's "additiion".
Quite. I believe that Debian packages should be as close to the packages
distributed by the upstream maintainers as possible, while fitting in
with the filesystem standard and the rest of Debian.
Steve Early
sde1000@cam.ac.uk
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