On Sat, Aug 26, 2000 at 08:58:07PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > If you care to understand those issues, you might want to take a look
> > at the debian-ctte traffic from a year ago.
> A year ago dpkg did not have an important feature today it has.
This only means we can change the recommendation in policy something like:
Former Debian releases placed all additional documentation in
`/usr/doc/<package>'. To realize a smooth migration to
`/usr/share/doc/<package>', each package must maintain a symlink
`/usr/doc/<package>' that points to the new location of its
- documentation in `/usr/share/doc/<package>'[1]. The symlink must be
- created when the package is installed; it cannot be contained in the
- package itself due to problems with `dpkg'. One reasonable way to
- accomplish this is to put the following in the package's `postinst':
+ documentation in `/usr/share/doc/<package>'[1]. The symlink may
+ either be included as part of the package itself, or created when
+ the package is installed.
It doesn't mean we should avoid the transition altogether.
> > What I don't get is why you're so eager to break things.
> Please define "break".
Break, verb: have apache and the various other programs that provide
browse /usr/doc (or /usr/share/doc, but not both) not find all the
documentation on the system.
Having this not happen was the major goal for the /usr/doc transition. For
potato, programs were meant to keep looking in /usr/doc, for woody ditto,
and for woody+1, they're meant to look solely in /usr/share/doc. That
way partial upgrades from slink to potato, from potato to woody, and
from woody to woody+1 would all behave perfectly, whether packages with
documentation were the ones being upgraded, or packages providing the
documentation.
I think though, probably because policy wasn't very clear about this,
that packages in potato already look in /usr/share/doc for documentation,
so they're already broken, and this may no longer really matter.
BTW, with the changes made to dpkg in potato, having base-files simply
move /usr/doc/* to /usr/share/doc/, rmdir /usr/doc and symlink the
two will work, as long as a new dpkg is installed first, making the
transition achievable within woody without breakage. Or so I believe,
anyway. Existing symlinks would need to be handled carefully, of course.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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