Absolute vs Relative links (Was: Re: Bug#84067: gedit postinst loses when /usr/share/doc is a symlink)

[Joe Drew <hoserhead@woot.net>]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 07:18:27PM -0500, Aaron M. Ucko wrote:
> On my system, /usr/share/doc is a symlink to /home/doc because that
> hierarchy was taking up too much space on its original partition.
> This arrangement breaks gedit's postinst, which assumes
> ../../gnome/help/gedit/C is a valid path relative to /usr/share/doc/gedit.
> Changing /usr/share/doc/gedit/html to be an absolute symlink should
> fix the problem.

Policy says: 

     In general, symbolic links within a top-level directory should be
     relative, and symbolic links pointing from one top-level directory
     into another should be absolute.  (A top-level directory is a
     sub-directory of the root directory `/'.)

However, in this case, and many much like it, this breaks horribly. Is this
a bug in policy? (If so, policy and debhelper's dh_link need to be changed).