Re: RFC: Policy 10.1 and appropriateness of package conflicts
On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 03:38:39PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> So the only purpose of "fsl" is to provide these namespace-eating
> convenience symlinks ? If so I'm not sure that this is a good purpose
> for a a package.
Well, it has been 'invented' to address a frequent user-problem that
people can readily use the GUI parts of that package (because they are
avialable via wrappers in /usr/bin and visible in the desktop menu), but
once they switch to the console they cannot "see" the rest of the suite.
Of course they should read the documentation to learn how they should
set up their $PATH correctly (and it is as simple as `man fsl`), but
instead they flood the upstream mailing list with things like "Debian package
broken...". I was trying to address this issue with a package that
specifically addresses these things _in addition_ to the actual package
that installs the suite into a private namespace.
> Rather, unconditionally install the convenience symlinks but in a
> dedicated directory which users can put on their PATH. Amongst other
> benefits, that will mean that the namespace clash can be resolved on a
> per-user basis.
This is already done that way for the 'fsl-4.1' that actually contains
the suite.
Still the question remains whether this setup is forbidden by policy 10.1?
Would it help to move the package from optional to extra?
Michael
--
GPG key: 1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke
http://mih.voxindeserto.de
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