PW#5-4: Gzipped symlinks

[Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de>]

[This mail is part of Debian Policy Weekly issue #5]

Topic 4: Gzipped symlinks

STATE: APPROVAL

Current policy requires all manual pages to be installed compressed. In some
cases where a program has different names, the manual page file might be a
symbolic link pointing to another file, for example "nview.1.gz ->
nvi.1.gz".

However, in some cases the maintainers installed the links without trailing
".gz", but pointing to a gzipped file, as in "nview.1 -> nvi.1.gz". Though
this works perfectly with "man", it's completely controversal to logic (at
least for me :). However, I've been requested to clarify this in the policy
manual.

So unless someone objects, I'll add the following statement to the section
about symbolic links:

     A symbolic link pointing to a compressed file should always use
     the same file extension as the referenced file. (For example, if a
     file called "foo.gz" is referenced by a symbolic link, the link
     filename has to end with ".gz" too, as in "bar.gz".)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------