Re: FHS - transition
> Ian> Please explain to me what part of my proposal contained an embarassing
> Ian> kludge ?
> A symlink to be removed on a flag day, things mass copied
> over, and another symlink placed, is not a kludge?
All migarions I have `survived' in Linux used a similar approach:
The `cua0 -> ttyS?' change wasn't carried out by:
1) patching every program to fallback to ttyS?.
2) removing cua? support from the kernel.
Instead things were done so both systems could coexist for a while. Someday
the kernel will drop cua? support, and nobody will notice it.
Same story with a.out -> ELF migration, libc5 -> libc6, etc.
The /var hierarchy was migrated with symlinks too, and it was as seamless
as it could be.
The main point are: `Do things in a way that old programs would still
work.' You can't know what weird setup a user is trying to use, perhaps he
has a custom CGI script to read manpages, one no debian-developer knows of.
Perhaps he hacked info to have colors once, and he would like to keep using
his program.
Besides, it's very unnatural and untidy for users who don't follow
Debian development to see these files in two places....
ETC...
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