Package: perl Version: 5.10.0-19 Severity: important As revealed by lintian, shipping /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright in perl-base and symlinking /usr/share/doc/perl-base -> perl is a policy violation. Quoting the policy:
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#s-copyrightfile Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright and distribution license in the file /usr/share/doc/package/copyright. This file must neither be compressed nor be a symbolic link. [...] /usr/share/doc/package may be a symbolic link to another directory in /usr/share/doc only if the two packages both come from the same source and the first package Depends on the second. These rules are important because copyrights must be extractable by mechanical means. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#s-changelogs Packages that are not Debian-native must contain a compressed copy of the debian/changelog file from the Debian source tree in /usr/share/doc/package with the name changelog.Debian.gz. Is there a historical reason for the current setup or is it just cosmetics? It's not causing any problems AFAIK, but I suppose we can't just ignore policy here. For reference, the current state is broadly perl-base /usr/share/doc/perl-base -> perl perl-base /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright perl-base /usr/share/doc/perl/changelog.Debian.gz perl-base /usr/share/doc/perl/Documentation (and others in perl/) perl-modules /usr/share/doc/perl-modules -> perl perl /usr/share/doc/perl/Changes.gz (and others in perl/) perl-doc /usr/share/doc/perl-doc -> perl perl-doc /usr/share/doc/perl/Changes5.000.gz (and others in perl/) giving justified lintian errors E: perl-base: usr-share-doc-symlink-without-dependency perl E: perl: no-copyright-file E: perl: debian-changelog-file-missing-or-wrong-name The best fix I can see is something like perl-base /usr/share/doc/perl-base/copyright perl-base /usr/share/doc/perl-base/changelog.Debian.gz perl-base /usr/share/doc/perl/Documentation (and others in perl/) perl /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright perl /usr/share/doc/perl/changelog.Debian.gz perl /usr/share/doc/perl/Changes.gz (and others in perl/) perl-modules /usr/share/doc/perl-modules -> perl perl-doc /usr/share/doc/perl-doc -> perl perl-doc /usr/share/doc/perl/Changes5.000.gz (and others in perl/) which would duplicate the copyright information and changelog.Debian.gz between perl and perl-base. Possibly, changelog.Debian.gz (but not copyright, as per the policy snippet above) could even be symlinked from perl to perl-base if we can rule out any possibility of a symlink loop with partial upgrades. The 35 kilobytes that Emdebian will strip anyway may not be worth the complication. The new perl package would need a Replaces: perl-base (<= 5.10.0-19) but I can't see any other obvious upgrade gotchas. More eyeballs are certainly be welcome. -- Niko Tyni [email protected] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
