Re: Conflicting manpage for queue.3

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 03:31:19PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> [ As suggested by Policy 10.1 [1], I am forwarding this issue to
>   debian-devel.  Please maintain the cc list in followups. ]
> 
> Recent versions of manpages-dev include a new manpage queue.3.  dqs has
> been providing a manpage by this name for some time.  Therefore there
> is a file conflict when attempting to install both.
> 
> manpages-dev is effectively a required package on any system where
> people do development.  Its contents are part of every major Linux
> distribution.  For us to rename the queue.3 manpage in manpages-dev would
> be a negative user experience for people switching to Debian or using
> a mixture of Debian and other non-Debian Linux systems.  Additionally,
> dqs is non-free and therefore "not part of Debian".  It seems doubly
> foolish for manpages-dev to rename its manpage.

I agree. There is a simple fix that can be applied to dqs with a minimum
of fuss: instead of calling its man page queue.3.gz, it can call it
queue.3dqs.gz (and similarly for the other overly-generally-named man
pages in that package, namely cache, list, and stack). 'man 3dqs queue'
or 'man -e dqs queue' will then show the version in dqs, and 'man -aw
queue' will list all pages with that name.

> [1] 10.1 Binaries
> 
> Two different packages must not install programs with different
> functionality but with the same filenames. (The case of two programs
> having the same functionality but different implementations is handled via
> "alternatives" or the "Conflicts" mechanism. See Maintainer Scripts,
> Section 3.10 and Conflicting binary packages - Conflicts, Section
> 7.3 respectively.) If this case happens, one of the programs must be
> renamed. The maintainers should report this to the debian-devel mailing
> list and try to find a consensus about which program will have to be
> renamed. If a consensus cannot be reached, both programs must be renamed.

Strictly this doesn't apply since 'queue' is not a binary, but obviously
file conflicts are bad anyway. Perhaps policy should have a similar
comment about manual pages containing a footnote documenting the
extension convention above.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]