Re: Policy Questions: Example files in /usr/share/doc
On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 05:27:16PM -0400, sharkey@ale.physics.sunysb.edu wrote:
> Another camp said that this practice should be avoided. The rationale
> was that administrators might do something more drastic to avoid
> populating /usr/share/doc in the first place, like mounting it as a
> read-only partition or using as yet unwritten options to dpkg to
> not unpack files under particular directories. They said it was
> safer to just put the conf file in /etc or whereever it belonged and
> mark it as a conffile and let dpkg's own internal conffile handling
> take care of conflicts.
That's not quite right. The case under consideration is where the
maintainer has decided to maintain the configuration file as a
configuration file, not as a conffile (think of apache's configuration
files, for example: would you really want to have
/etc/apache/httpd.conf as a conffile?!). The second camp said:
put the default configuration in /usr/{share,lib}/$package and copy it
from there in the postinst (or from a configuration program) if
necessary. If it's also a good example, then symlink it from
/usr/share/doc/$package/examples.
I too side with the second camp: the file is not really documentation,
it's got more important functions.
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
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