Hi, On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 02:54:38PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > Many of the bits of the policy manual, and informal practice, suggest > naming directories after your package. > ... > In general, the principle should be that where to look in the > filesystem for something should not depend on how the packages have > been organised. > > For example, there has been a recent trend for FOO's documentation > package FOO-doc to contain /usr/share/doc/FOO-doc/html/index.html (or > whatever). I think this is daft. It should be in > /usr/share/doc/FOO/html/index.html. That way you can find the > documentation for FOO in the filesystem without knowing whether the > FOO package happens to have been split into FOO and FOO-doc, or for > that matter libFOO8.9-dev, FOO-bin, etc. etc. etc.
As for /usr/share/doc/* area, there are a few types of stems chosen. 1. package name: alsa-base, aptitude, aptitude-doc-en, ... (lower case, most common) 2. Category name: FAQ, HOWTO, HTML, RFC (Always upper case) 3. Historic/Upstream choice (?): /usr/share/doc/texmf (Several TeX packages uses this.) I agree that historical best practice for FOO-doc was to put documentation in /usr/share/doc/FOO or /usr/share/doc/FOO-common (when there is FOO1 and FOO2 variants but one each of FOO-doc and FOO-common package). One of the early days of debian-doc before I joined created doc-base for package so we can have one single data base to look. Unfortunately, I hear some packages do not use it these days but it is very good shape in general. /usr/share/doc/HTML is populated with data taken from doc-base as I understand. But it is much nice to have documents located by their package name stem. In any case, this is about *best practice* and something to put in developers reference, I think. If /usr/share/doc/FOO-doc has html, it will be at least nice to have symlink from /usr/share/doc/FOO. If we go for this common practice, we may need to ask FAQ, HOWTO, RFC, texmf to be changed/moved to regular places. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110106164807.ga3...@debian.org
