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Re: finishing up the /usr/share/doc transition



On Fri, Dec 22, 2000 at 01:04:26PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> It has been more than 1 year since the technical committee decided how
> the /usr/share/doc transition would be accomplished[1], and in that time
> most packages have implementede the transition. The decision stated that
> "Thus, potato+1 (woody) ships with a full /usr/share/doc, and a
> /usr/doc full of symlinks." and went on to detail how woody+1 (sarge?)
> will begin to phase out the symlinks and how woody+2 will finally be
> free of this mess. 
> 
> I'm looking forward to a day with a lot less postinst and postrm scripts
> myself, so I want to make sure we don't miss the traget of full
> conversion by woody's release.
> 
> There are a total of 645 packages that have not been converted[2]. There
> are 16 weeks between December 31st and Aj's projected freeze date for woody.
> If 40 people could do one package a week, we would be done. Or 20 people
> doing two a week, or just 6 people doing one a day. In other words, it
> seems acheivable, especially if we file bugs now on the undone packages,
> which would probably wake a fair number of maintainers up..
> 
> What do you think?

I think we need to reevaluate this decision based on the fact that the bug
in dpkg that forced this implementation (as opposed to a clean /usr/doc
symlink to share/doc) has been gone for awhile now (the potato dpkg is
fixed).

For those that do not remember, the bug in dpkg would have caused doc
files to go missing if /usr/doc was a symlink to share/doc, once a package
was upgraded from the latter to the former (docs in /usr/share/doc).

That is no longer the case, so I would hope that our efforts would be
better spent writing a transition script to handle the move (moving things
from /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc, if needed, and removing symlinks). Note
that I have a /usr/doc -> share/doc symlink on all my systems right now
(note, auric is also setup this way, running potato, without any errors or
missing files).

Can we do this and avoid further hacking around with this? Moving to
/usr/share/doc in woody is possible. The tools handle it, packages
that support the symlink in postinst/prerm already magically work (IOW,
any policy abiding app supports it), packages that use the old /usr/doc
work with it, and new packages that only use /usr/share/doc will work with
it.

We just need a script/program that sanely does this transition, then
creates the /usr/doc -> share/doc symlink.

Ben

-- 
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/  Ben Collins  --  ...on that fantastic voyage...  --  Debian GNU/Linux   \
`  bcollins@debian.org  --  bcollins@openldap.org  --  bcollins@linux.com  '
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