Bug#40706: usr/share/doc vs. /usr/doc
On Wed, 7 Jul 1999, Roland Rosenfeld wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Jul 1999, Santiago Vila wrote:
>
> > > With this we have the following four stages:
>
> > For people not using helper tools (there are many of them), this
> > means *double* work for every package, because you have first to
> > provide symlinks and then you have to remove them.
> >
> > I do not think it is reasonable.
>
> I see the problem, but I don't see an alternative proposal.
> Do you think that all packages will be converted to FHS before
> releasing potato?
No, I don't think *all* packages will be converted. Of course not.
> This is my preferred solution, but I don't think
> that it is really possible to convert all packages for all
> architectures soon.
However, if we convert 90%, 80% or just 20% of them (if the most popular
ones are included in that 20%), then it would not be such a disaster, IMHO.
> > The FHS migration will be painful enough so that we have to make it
> > twice. Better to do it at a time (on a per package basis), only
> > *once*.
>
> I prefer some pain to us developers in contrast to the pain to the
> users who have to search for every single package documentation, if we
> use two directories for this in parallel.
Please, multiply whatever pain by the number of packages in the
distribution. Having to look to /usr/doc as well as /usr/share/doc is
not such a great inconvenience, after all.
> > I would much prefer some sort of "light" release goal (i.e. not to
> > be interpreted very strictly). For example: "We will try to make all
> > base and priority >= standard packages in potato to use
> > /usr/share/doc instead of /usr/doc".
>
> This doesn't really help the user searching for documentation. He
> still has to search both directories for the documentation, if he
> doesn't know which packages are priority >= standard (I personally
> don't know this for most packages).
I think it would help.
The point is that packages which are priority >= standard tend to be quite
"popular" (in the sense that many people have them installed). We could
set as a goal to convert those packages (which are only a few, compared to
the thousands the complete distribution has), and then we could be
almost sure that many of the packages installed in a typical system
would be already converted.
It would help because /usr/doc could become almost empty *for a typical
system*. (Not if you install the 2500+ packages, of course).
> I prefer a release "light" goal, like this: "Every package
> documentation can be accessed as /XXX/<package>" (where XXX is a
> constant for _all_ packages). This was true for slink and I think it
> should be true for potato, too. Otherwise potato will be worse than
> slink and IMHO we shouldn't step back...
It is not a light goal if it takes double work to everybody.
We could have some sort of FHS-threshold for the release:
"We will not release until 90% of all priority >= standard packages are
converted to use /usr/share/doc" or else "we will not release until 80% of
the 300 most popular packages are converted to use /usr/share/doc".
--
"daf503f1660a0508645a16cbce42a559" (a truly random sig)
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