Re: Question about the policy

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hilmar Preusse <hille42@web.de> wrote:

> Hi Florent, hi all,

Since AFAIK Florent is on vacation, I won't be able to keep my mouth
shut until he speaks up, anyway.  So I can as well throw in my opinion
first. 

> in the file, and installing a file in
> /var/lib/tex-common/fontmap-cfg/ with the name package.list and the
> content
[...]
> Anybody has a clue, why the file, which determines if the map file
> should be read or not during generating updmap.cfg, should got into
> /var instead of /usr/share?

I think we could as well put them into
/usr/share/tex-common/fontmap-cfg.  However, somehow a path with "lib"
in it feels better, even if it is architecture independent.  I don't
know why, I just can give examples of other packages that do similar
things:

Have a look at ucf, maintained by Manoj Srivasta who is the DPL's
delegate for the Debian Policy, and should probably know.  It uses
/var/lib/ucf for storing its hashfiles, and /var/lib/ucf/cache for
storing copies of installed versions of configuration files.  The
hashfile just looks like the output of "md5sum $filelist", i.e. it is
plain text, the configuration files are also only plain text.
Furthermore, ucf is meant to be used by maintainer scripts, when /usr
has to be mounted writeable, anyway.

Hm.  The difference is that if you say "dpkg-reconfigure foo", and foo
uses ucf, /var/lib/ucf/hashfile is changed, whereas the files currently
in /var/lib/tex-common/fontmap-cfg are not.  In other words, the reason
why ucf stores its files in /var/lib is that /var/share does not exist,
not because */lib/* is the right place, and /usr/lib is wrong because it
is for arch-dependent stuff.

We should really decide on this before we upload teTeX-3.0 to unstable
and start bugging maintainers to fix their font packages.  What a pity
that Florent is not here...

Regards, Frank

P.S. Hilmar, if you're interested, you could try to dig through the
mailing list archives - there's been a lot of discussion between Florent
and me about the topic, and maybe he has already expressed his opinion
somewhere.  If you in fact have time and interest, please speak up...

-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer