Re: Moving to the FHS: not right now!

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

Chris Waters wrote:
> *None* of the proposals (I think we're up to four now) seem to have
> *major* problems.  However, the symlinks seem unnecessary to me,
> *unless* we want to make unstable more consistent, at the cost of
> making stable somewhat uglier, and unless we want to add *permanent*
> overhead to all packages for all eternity (or at least the next three
> or four releases, minimum).

That last sentence is an error.  When all packages have moved to
/usr/share/doc, we can drop the symlink handling code from the
postinst and prerm, with no loss.  That is because at every upgrade,
the symlink is removed by the old package and (possibly) reinstalled
by the new package.  No dangling symlinks, no prerm cruft, no traces
of the transition once it's complete.  When I realized this, my
approval for Manoj's solution increased tremendously :)

The only remaining technical objection I have to it is that it will
fail for packages that have extra files in their /usr/doc directory,
either due to package cruft or because the system admin put something
there.  Those packages can not make the symlink because there's still
a real directory, and it will appear to the user that the
documentation is simply missing.

> I'm not a fan, because it seems to consider unstable to be more
> important than stable.

I disagree with you on this.  I think we've become too focused on
releases.  It is important that "stable" be stable, but the essense
of Debian is much more in the vibrantly alive "unstable" than in
what we end up putting on CDs.

Richard Braakman