Re: Question regarding policy wording

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:

> Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> writes:
>
>> It is common practice that /usr/share/doc/<package>/ is a symlink to
>> /usr/share/doc/<other_package>/ if <package> Depends: <other_package>.
>> Therefore I don't see why the copyright file couldn't be a symlink to
>> /usr/share/doc/<other_package>/copyright.
>
> When would you want to do this and not link the whole doc directory?

The question came up with the latex-cjk packages on alioth; there's
going to be a latex-cjk-common package with little functionality on its
own, but each of the latex-cjk-whatever packages depend on it.  So it
would make sense to have only one copy of the common copyright file.

But it does *not* make sense to include all the documentation of all
packages in latex-cjk-common, they're better sorted into the doc
directories of the individual packages.  Therefore a directory symlink
isn't an alternative.

> The goal is to ensure that the copyright file is always installed and
> accurate for that binary package, so it must be impossible for it to be
> symlinked to another package that isn't a dependency or that doesn't come
> from exactly the same source package (since licensing information
> changes).

Okay, so that would mean that the package containing the symlink would
need to Depend on the same upstream version of the other package.  This
rules out using the scheme for latex-cjk, but it does make sense for
libraries:  They have a common copyright, the -dev package usually
depends on the exact same version of the package with the runtime files,
and it does not make sense to put all the developer documentation into
the runtime package.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)