Pain in /usr/share; just me?

["Mr. Christopher F. Miller" <cfm@maine.com>]

I've not heard anyone else mention this.  Maybe I'm the 
only one having a hard time with /usr/share.  I must be
doing it wrong.

We have /usr/doc, /usr/info, /usr/share nfs mounted.  We
want all the docs available on all our machines, even if
the software is not on any particular machine.  Otherwise
we found ourselves rooting around through various machines
to find docs.  Painful.

Now we are running into all sorts of problems like this:

...
Removing a2ps ...
dpkg: error processing a2ps (--remove):
 cannot remove file `/usr/share/doc/a2ps/NEWS.gz': No such file or directory
Errors were encountered while processing:
 a2ps
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Where remove fails when a file is not there to be removed.

or this:
Unpacking replacement a2ps ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/a2ps_4.12h-4_i386.deb (--unpack):
 unable to make backup link of `./usr/share/a2ps/ps/bold.pro' before installing new version: File exists
dpkg: error while cleaning up:
 unable to restore backup version of `/usr/share/a2ps/ps/bw.pro': No such file or directory
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/a2ps_4.12h-4_i386.deb

where there are now multiple .dpkg-tmp files and the
install scripts will fail first on one, then the other in a loop.

I must be doing something wrong.  Is it just really bad conceptually
to share /usr/share?

Thanks for any insight

cfm



-- 

Christopher F. Miller, Publisher                             cfm@maine.com
MaineStreet Communications, Inc         208 Portland Road, Gray, ME  04039
1.207.657.5078                                       http://www.maine.com/
Database publishing, e-commerce, office/internet integration, Debian linux.