Re: /usr/share/doc (was Re: weekly policy summary)
On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Anthony Towns wrote:
> FWIW, I don't think forcing all packages to have postinst's and prerm's
> for the rest of eternity to be a particularly good solution either. Are
> there any fundamental problems with using a cronjob instead?
This was just discussed on irc a bit.. Ah, basically any attempt to
provide 'legacy' symlinks that make /usr/doc/foo == /usr/share/doc/foo
will either break upgrading, downgrading or both.
dpkg has no ability to resolve multiple paths to the same files in it's
database, so it sees /usr/share/doc/pkg/bar and /usr/doc/pkg/bar as
-different non overwriting- files and will end up doing the wrong thing
when it comes time to erase the old versions files. Basically it will do:
create /usr/share/doc/pkg/bar
rm /usr/doc/pkg/bar
Which is perfectly sensible -IF- they did not happen to be the same
directory!!
The only two options are;
1) Do nothing, painfully migrate every package
2) Add post-inst/pre-rm code to ever package to manage symlinks - this
only works for backwards compatibilty and not forwards.
A cronjob is a bad idea because the links will persist for dpkg operations
and basically cause upgrades/downgrades to fail.
There is no elegant way to piece wise move a directory spanning multiple
packages with dpkg.
Jason
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