Essential stuff in /usr/doc (Was Re: Installing things into a...)
Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Jaldhar> I just uploaded the WDG HTML Validator. I put the HTML in
> Jaldhar> /usr/doc/wdg-html-validator. Policy says /usr/doc should
> Jaldhar> map to the URL /doc. And yes, /usr/lib/cgi-bin is the right
> Jaldhar> place to put CGI scripts.
>
> Umm. I should be able to nuke /usr/doc on a machine and still
> have it work
Why would you expect that? It's not policy yet. Some packages
have _all_ their useful info in /usr/doc (debian-policy,
developers-reference, mh-book, etc)
> There have been proposals of enhancing the install process to
> allow users to set dir trees where things are not installed (like if
> I have a bunch of identical machines where /usr is shared I may only
> want /usr updaed on one machine). This can also be used to zap
> /usr/doc on machines where disk space is tight
If we (collectively) decided to do that as policy, then the above
packages would surely be changed to move essential files out of
/usr/doc. So why suggest different rules on wdg-html-validator?
> The problem is similar to that of navigation button images in
> html files generated by latex2html. The solution there was to create
> the /var/www/usr/lib/latex2html/icons/ dir, and symlink the iocons in
> from /usr/lib/latex2html/icons/.
Isn't that simply so the same links work with either prefix file: or
http://host/ ? (I speak without knowledge of that package).
(I have a perhaps similar problem with mh-book: I wrote a cgi-bin
search engine that returns URLs like file:/usr/doc/mh-book/...
and so it won't really work for remote hosts accessing mh-book
through http://SERVER_NAME/doc/mh-book; the solution is probably
to return http://SERVER_NAME/doc/mh-book URLs instead of
file:/usr/doc/mh-book because that also works locally but then I
have to parse config files to get the SERVER_NAME like dwww does.
I assume I can't expect $ENV{SERVER_NAME} to work for all
cgi-bin capable web servers as it does for Apache)
Peter Galbraith
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