Re: Deleting uncompressed Info/Doc files at upgrades
I wrote:
> It occurs to me that upgrading a package should delete old versions
> of user-uncompressed doc and info files.
Santiago Vila wrote:
> The package system is not supposed to read your mind.
>
> You should never uncompress files "in place" because then dpkg will be
> unable to remove the files which belong to a certain package when it is
> removed or replace by a new one.
I wrote back:
> But... That was my point!
>
> Uncompressing docs or info is *not* unusual, nor should it be frowned
> upon. We should accommodate the possibility of that happening. The same
> way that a properly-configured Emacs will read-in a compressed file
> correctly, dpkg should treat an uncompressed file as the same and upgrade
> it.
Craig Sanders wrote:
> no tool will ever be smart enough to cope perfectly with users leaving
> crud all over the disk.
>
> users should uncompress their files to /tmp or under /usr/local or some
> other more suitable location. if they choose to do otherwise, then
> they should accept the consequences of their actions and deal with it
> themselves.
So, at least Craig Sanders and Santiago Vila are so engrained into Debian
that they now think the original usable file is the gzip'ed one, not the
author's original text. I disagree.
Sure, dealing with uncompressed files on upgrade is a special case. Sure
dpkg should have to be changed, or maybe /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list file
could have regular expressions, like:
/usr/info/emacs-e20-2(.gz)?
Mike Stone wrote:
> Hmm. We have zless to less gz'd files.
You see, I didn't even know about that program!
> Magicfilter will print them, as
> will a2ps (maybe some others will too, haven't tried it.) Netscape reads
> them, so does lynx. And of course man and info work with them. zgrep
> will grep them. vim reads them just fine. I'm drawing a blank on things
> I can't do with .gz'd files...
- A new user won't know about special setups needed for emacs, less and
other program.
- When I switched to Debian, I used ghostview and not gv for
postscript (out of luck there too).
- A new user may need the docs on a crippled system, or on a system with
only the base system installed.
- If you are using some docs often on a 486, you end up uncompressing them
because it's too slow otherwise.
I'm not arguing that dpkg should handle .aux files files behind after
someone has latex'ed docs. I'm arguing that the `intent' of packaging
a compressed file is to have the uncompressed original available on the
system. Debian upgrades should therefore acknowledge the possibility that
files have been decompressed.
--
Peter Galbraith, research scientist <GalbraithP@dfo-mpo.gc.ca>
Maurice Lamontagne Institute, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada
P.O. Box 1000, Mont-Joli Qc, G5H 3Z4 Canada. 418-775-0852 FAX: 775-0546
6623'rd GNU/Linux user at the Counter - http://counter.li.org/
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