Re: FHS - transition
Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> writes:
> On Tue, 6 Oct 1998, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > (See also my post to debian-devel about this. In particular, I'm
> > opposed to /var/state and think we should ignore the FHS on this
> > point.)
> >
> > One of the key changes that the FHS has compared to the FSSTND is the
> > existence of /usr/share. I think this is perfectly appropriate, but
> > it will take some effort. We need to make sure that everything works
> > during the transitional period.
> >
> > The following things should be done in the following order:
> >
> > 1. base-files should be amended to contain /usr/share/man,
> > /usr/share/doc and similar, as symlinks to /usr/man, etc.
> > base-files's postinst should check that none of these directories
> > exist as actual directories in both places and fail with an error
> > message if they do.
> > [ snipped ]
>
> I strongly disagree. In fact, I see this as a contradiction to your
> earlier post, in which you said: "no `flag day', no moving everything at
> once".
>
> We have discussed this before, but it seems that you missed the discussion
> at all: If man and info are modified so that they support both old and new
> locations, we will not have to symlink anything, and we will not need to
> copy a lot of files from a directory to another one. Just upgrade packages
> incrementally and the ones being FHS-compliant will have already the files
> in /usr/share.
I agree. To reformulate a little bit:
1. Debian institutes FHS (probably, with caveats) into Policy
2. info browsers, manual pagers, terminfo libraries, etc., are
modified to support *both* /usr/man and /usr/share/man, etc. (applies
to /usr/share/{man,info,dict,terminfo,tmac}, not so sure about whether
we can tolerate two locations for
/usr/share/{locale,nls,terminfo,zoneinfo}). This should happen early
on in an unstable release. We might need to use a versioned
base-files dependancy for this. This is the closest we come to a flag
date; if we can handle the locale,nls,terminfo,zoneinfo directories
gracefully it should be much of a flag at all.
3. lintian is modified to warn about installing info pages, man pages,
and other stuff into places other than /usr/share
4. Packages eventually eliminate files in /usr/man etc., dpkg will
eventually remove these dirs when nothing is in them.
The only sticky point, really, is /usr/doc. Moving that to
/usr/share/doc is going to be difficult. Maybe we could just avoid
that....? Or, maybe the best thing here is to have base-files symlink
/usr/share/doc to ../doc, and provide instructions to sysadmins on how
they can reverse that symlinks (i.e., if they are doing
arch-independant NFS sharing.
Of course, there are other issues w.r.t. FHS vs FSSTD, but I'm just
dealing with /usr/share in this email.
.....A. P. Harris...apharris@onShore.com...<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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