How we got here, and how to prevent it from happening again.
Greetings,
If I understand it, we got to the current situation with regard to
/usr/doc and /usr/share/doc by something like the following process:
We were FSSSTD compliant, and everyone was happy -- except those
working on FSSSTD, who saw some problems with the FSSSTD. They worked
on the FHS, and got that released.
Someone made the suggestion that by policy, we switch to FHS.
After some discussion, a consensus was reaced that this was a good
idea, and it became policy. I don't remember there being any
substantitive discussion of the technical merits or difficulties, or of
the changes that that would entail. Granted, I might not have been
reading debian-policy at the time.
Some packages followed the new policy, esp. with regard to
/usr/share/doc and /usr/share/man.
Then people realised there is a problem with this, and no agreement
has been able to be reached concerning what to do about it.
It seems to me that the root of the problem is that it wasn't clearly
understood by everyone what the switch from FSSSTD to FHS would entail.
It's a major change, and perhaps people acted a bit hastily in making
it.
I would like to suggest that future policy change proposals include a
discription of the impact the policy change would have on Debian. That
way, when there is something like this which has a major potentially
problematic change, it can be discussed before it becomes policy.
At this point, I think we should not be talking about rescinding
policy, but implementing policy.
My thoughts on the current problem:
We have in the past moved from /usr/doc/copyright/<package> to
/usr/doc/<package>/copyright, and from /usr/doc/examples/<package> to
/usr/doc/<package>/examples. In theory, there are forward and backward
incompatabilities with those changes as well. For that matter, has
anyone tried recently to install and run a package from Debian 1.1? We
may not be living up to our forward/backward goal as fully as we
pretend anyway.
I would suggest leaving policy as is, but adding to base-files
/usr/doc/README and /usr/share/doc/README which advise users of the
changes caused by the FHS transition. Individual packages would be
free (as they have been doing) to migrate to /usr/share/doc. Packages
which depend on stuff being in /usr/doc (like dhelp) should be fixed to
look in both places.
I do not fully understand the issue with dpkg and symlinks. If
version 1-1 of a package used /usr/doc, and version 1-2 used
/usr/share/doc, but included a symlink from /usr/doc/<package> to
/usr/share/doc/<package>, would things work right? Or would that
trigger the problem?
If that works, I'd suggest that such compatability symlinks (on a
per-package basis) be -optional-, but recommended.
--
Buddha Buck bmbuck@zaphid.dhis.edu
"Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our
liberty depends upon the chaos and cacaphony of the unfettered speech
the First Amendment protects." -- A.L.A. v. U.S. Dept. of Justice
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