Re: Vanishing /usr/doc symlink
Joey Hess:
> I'm not especially concerned with Julian's case, the important point is
> that fresh installs of woody will never get a /usr/doc directory, and so
> no symlinks will be made there (since the link creation is done iff the
> directory exists).
Exactly, but this is not a tragedy but a good thing. The symlinks
exist to support partial upgrades from slink to potato and from potato
to woody. Every package in woody will use /usr/share/doc so we don't
need the symlinks anymore in a fresh install.
> This will result in inconsistencies between debian
> systems that were freshly installed and those that were upgraded, and I
> think it will lead to some confusion amoung our users.
different != inconsistent. As an example, a Debian system upgraded
from slink to potato has the mail spool in /var/spool/mail. A fresh
potato install has it in /var/mail. Yes, this means a slink system
upgraded to potato is *different* than a fresh potato install, but I
would never call this an inconsistency.
> Bear in mind that many people who are still using potato now are still
> used to using /usr/doc now. So they upgrade to woody and that still
> works. And then they do a fresh install, and all the documentation seems
> to have gone away.
>
> Woody is really supposed to be the release in which our users learn
> about /usr/share/doc and switch over to using it; and then the next
> release nobody should care when /usr/doc goes missing. Jumping the gun
> on this, and worse, doing so inconsistently, is just not a good thing.
potato users already know that potato is in the middle of a transition
from /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc. A user would have to be *very* clueless
to be surprised about docs being all in /usr/share/doc in woody.
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