Package: general Severity: normal In 1999, Debian began moving /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc to comply with the FHS. Due to unfortunate dpkg issues at the time, we couldn't simply move the directory and be done with it, but decided to move things peicemeil by updating all packages. Due to some silly concerns about users having to look in two places during the transition, we decided to start by making /usr/doc/<package> -> /usr/share/doc/<package> symlinks. In 2001, putting any documentation in /usr/doc became a serious policy violation. The symlinks were still allowed. In 2002, we completed the first stage of the transition, released woody with complete /usr/share/doc and /usr/doc directories, and policy was changed to not require the /usr/doc symlinks. debhelper was changed to stop adding postinst and postrm fragments to manage the links, and so most packages only needed a recompile to finish the transition. We are now in the final, worst stages of this transition, when the few remaining links in /usr/doc are due to packages that either use debhelper and are so unmaintained they've not been updated since 2002, or do not use debhelper and have not been modified to remove the code, or worst, have been modified to remove the code, but botched it. Policy is expected to be changed soon to make any files in /usr/doc a serious bug. For now it is a normal bug. A typical Debian unstable system today will have a dozen or two of these symlinks left. This tracking bug is here because that is ugly and we should completely finish the transition. Set any bugs about /usr/doc stuff to being blockers of this bug report. Use this as a tracking/coordination bug for the remainder of the transition. Note that once this transition is complete we will need to do something in base-files to remove the /usr/doc directory, if it is empty. It won't be empty in all cases, for example a user might have non-debian or old packages that have not transitioned still installed. This bug can be reassigned to base-files to deal with that last step once it is no longer blocked by any other bugs. -- see shy jo
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