Re: changelog and /usr/share/doc/package as a symlink
On Sat, Apr 27, 2002 at 10:09:12AM -0700, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
> On 27-Apr-2002 Junichi Uekawa wrote:
> > Oohara Yuuma <oohara@libra.interq.or.jp> cum veritate scripsit:
> >
> >> Suppose that a source package makes two .deb, "package-data" and "package"
> >> (which depends on "package-data"), and /usr/share/doc/package is a symlink
> >> to /usr/share/doc/package-data . Should "package" depend on exactly the
> >> same version of "package-data"?
> >
> > Why do you have to make it a symlink at all ?
> >
> > By doing that you are distributing a .deb file
> > which does not contain copyright information, etc.
>
> it is legal *IFF* the package depends on another package from the same source.
Yes, but how useful is this really? And is it worth the cost?
It is certainly more convenient to have all of the documentation available
in /usr/share/doc/<package>, for any binary <package> from the same source.
I appreciate having the directory structure work out this way. However, I
don't like .debs that don't contain changelogs. It is irritating to fetch
and unpack a .deb looking for a changelog, and find that it is in another
package (especially when the source package is enormous). The changelog and
copyright are quite small, and the rest of the documentation can be
symlinked on its own.
apt-listchanges has to jump through some strange hoops in order to work
correctly with this setup, and I'm sure that there are some weird cases
(such as the example above, where the versions are out of sync) that it
could miss.
Of course, I wouldn't cry about that if we had get-changelog.cgi again. But
I personally would like to see changelog treated more as a control file than
a convention. It would be nice if it were as easy to extract this
information from a binary package as a source package. The same goes for
copyright, which contains lots of useful stuff that should be in a
machine-readable format (such as the upstream homepage URL, if there is
one).
--
- mdz
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