/usr/share/doc (was Re: weekly policy summary)
Regarding the share/doc proposal. My apologies if this repeating
someone else's comments, I have not read all the messages in the
threads.
On Fri, Jul 16, 1999 at 02:35:04PM -0700, Joey Hess wrote:
> Usr/share/doc vs. /usr/doc (#40706)
> * Under discussion.
> * Proposed by Manoj Srivastava; seconded by Joey Hess.
> * /usr/doc has moved, and we want to have a good transition to
> /usr/share/doc without breaking backwards compatability and
> incremental upgrades. This proposal is to make each package manage
> the transition on its own by managing a /usr/doc/package ->
> /usr/share/doc/package symlink. At some future date, all these
> links will be removed.
> ( Several proposals have been posted to this bug report, I am
> covering only the latest one. )
Has no one seriously considered the mess that will happen if you try
to follow this path (namely, making each package manage the transition
by itself)? Think about all the typos (like "[-L foo]") that people
are going to make, the number of link-handling scripts that bomb out
or do the wrong thing, the number of unwanted symlinks that will be
lying around once the dust settles, and the crap that will live in the
maintainer scripts forever (well, a long time). Think about how few
maintainers test their scripts exhaustively (for idempotency etc.)
(when doing upgrade, new install, failed-upgrade, configure, remove,
purge, etc.).
I will oppose the proposal unless it contains code fragments that a)
have been thoroughly tested, b) have been shown to be the only real
solution, and c) will be mandated.
One question, does the FHS permit "/usr/share/doc -> ../doc" ? If so,
there is a very simple solution (forbid the use of /usr/share/doc and
have base-files contain this symlink; this does not address mount and
partition issues).
A better solution (than the proposed one) would be one that has all
the code in only one place and the opportunity to fail at only one
time. Alas, I do not have such a thing.
Unfortunately, various people have pre-empted the policy discussion
and have started using /usr/share/doc already.
Giuliano.
Reply to: