Bug#1220: CVS postinst message rather verbose
I've taken debian-bugs out of the list of recipients; I think the
points made here apply more generally than just to CVS.
Bill Mitchell writes:
>We still haven't characterized our target debian users very well.
>My sense of it is that a large proportion of users will have
>systems which are essentially personal systems, where the debian
>installer will be the primary system user -- perhaps the only
>system user.
That may be the case but we should seek solutions which make sense
both on single-user and multi-user systems. I, for example, am now in
both situations, though I only have one other user and he's doing most
of his work on his own machine.
Our target is clearly the entire universe, anyway - anyone fancying
translating the GPL into Martian? ;-)
>The cvs postinst does three things:
>
>1. Install the cvs info page. This, of course, needs to be done.
Yup.
>
>2. Displays an install-time blurb pointing to /usr/doc/cvs/contrib
> for some useful aids which are distributed with the cvs package,
> and which cvs users ought to look at and decide about adopting.
/usr/doc is the correct place to look for extra information on all
packages, it's not the place of individual packages to point this out.
Furthermore, install time is the wrong time to point this out as only
the installer should see it; the correct place to do this is
/etc/motd; or even better, the system administrator should point it
out to new users when their accounts are created.
>3. Offers to install a CVS repository.
[...]
>
>Keeping the same thing in mind, what about installing a CVS
>repository? I'm not personally a CVS user, but it strikes me
>that this is only useful in the personal-user case. I do
>recall, however, that I spent some time with my nose in the
>CVS manuals before I figured out that a CVS repository was
>important and how to install one.
I had a look at /usr/doc/cvs/INSTALL.gz. This tells you to create a
master repository; I assume this means that the software is useless
without one (BUT someone who actually knows CVS a bit might want to
correct me here). Therefore one must have been created by the end of
the install, and there's no need to even tell the user about this,
much less ask them.
ttfn/rjk
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