Bug#40706: usr/share/doc vs. /usr/doc
On Mon, 05 Jul 1999, Steve Greenland wrote:
> > > Agreed, users should not be forced to upgrade unnecessarily, nor
> > > accross-the-board, and we should make that as painlesl *as
> > > reasonably feasible*.
> > That's what I mean.
>
> But that's different than "without *any* drawbacks".
English isn't my native language, so it can happen, that I'm not able
to exactly express what I mean...
> > But for the /usr/doc vs. /usr/share/doc topic this means, that the
> > user has to upgrade _all_ packages (Presumed that _all_ developers
> > rebuild _all_ packages according to FHS soon, which isn't very
> > realistic).
> No, they don't have to upgrade. They can choose between upgrading a
> package, or accepting that for the packages they choose not to
> upgrade, they'll have to continue to use /usr/doc/.
Presumed that _all_ packages for _all_ architectures are FHS compliant
at the moment we release 2.2. I fear, that this isn't possible if we
want to release potato in the next half year.
So I still think that we need some interim solution until all packages
are FHS compliant. And we should find this solution before the first
packages using /usr/share/doc are uploaded (I saw a lintian bug
report, where someone noted that his FHS compliant packages didn't
pass the lintian tests, so people already started using /usr/share/doc
and we should find an interim solution soon).
> Actually, I'm not against the symlinks; I think they're a reasonable
> idea.
Good to hear. So we may have misunderstood each other because of my
language problems...
> It's just that when people start tossing out statements that sound
> like "Debian is committed to letting you continue to use the
> four-year-old version of package x without *any* drawbacks", my
> alarms go off.
That wasn't my intension. But you should keep in mind, that there are
still packages build in 1997 in slink (uudeview for example). So I
fear that it may take some time to move the complete distribution to
FHS. I fear that it will take at least one year until all packages are
changed and I address this time.
I would prefer a way using postinst or dpkg to provide the symlinks to
be able to remove them at some point in the future without uploading
all packages (with the symlink removed) again.
But at the moment I don't fully know how to do this in detail. We
should find a solution for this (which could be supported by
debhelper) soon.
Ciao
Roland
--
* roland@spinnaker.de * http://www.spinnaker.de/ *
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