Re: Bug#42477: PROPOSED} delay the /usr/doc transition till after potato

[Mike Goldman <whig@by.net>]

Chris Waters wrote:

> >         I have a couple of things to say about this proposal. I think
> >  that we have a bad track record when it comes to merely deferring the
> >  issue until a latter date
>
> This proposal defers nothing.  It merely mandates a *delay* for the
> transition.  Granted, it does leave room for someone to come up with a
> "deus ex machina" solution to the migration (i.e. a working patch to
> dpkg that magically fixes everything, and which IWJ loves), but it
> doesn't rely on any such thing.  It's very simple.  Potato continues
> to use /usr/doc, Woody and beyond use /usr/share/doc.  No fuss, no muss.

I disagree.  Your proposal would have been very worthwhile if made *before* the
new Policy was adopted, and *before* lintian began complaining about files in
/usr/doc.  Okay, maybe it was premature, and it was a bad idea at the time, and
so forth.  But the fact is, most developers do *not* read -policy, they read
Policy, and hopefully pay attention to lintian.  There is no requirement or even
expectation that -policy be monitored for disputes.

So the fact is, many packages, some of which are very large, and thus time
consuming to build and upload, have been converted to the FHS /usr/share/doc.
To tell the developers of these packages that, through no fault of their own,
they must rebuild and reupload, not once, but twice, first to move *back* to
/usr/doc, and later forward to /usr/share/doc again, is serious "muss and fuss"
indeed!

My withdrawal of formal objection aside, I still consider this a *seriously*
misguided proposal, and an unnecessary one.  Moving (automatically) to
/usr/share/doc is just not that hard IMNSHO.

If the Technical Committee resolves to stay with /usr/doc as you've proposed,
I think it would be a mistake, but I will comply.  I hope they will consider my
recommendation to simply use an automatic migration script to simply move
noncompliant packages to the appropriate FHS location, leaving a README in
/usr/doc for our users.