On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 03:13:35AM +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote: > On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 01:38:32PM +0100, Lucas B. Cohen wrote: > > Is it considered acceptable for a package to blindly delete, then > > recreate its entire directory under /usr/share/doc upon installation or > > upgrade ? > > I would consider it extremely unacceptable. Your package can fiddle with > files > it owns, but anything else is Right Out.
This does sound odd, but I have in some cases needed to do this. For example, cupsys-driver-gimpprint used to generate PPD files on installation and would purge and re-create them on upgrade (under /usr/share/ppd/gimpprint/$version). Because these were not under the control of the packaging system, I felt that blindly removing that part of the tree was acceptable--nothing else would ever have a reason to alter or put anything in that location. Thankfully nowadays we no longer need to pre-generate that data so we can simply rely on dpkg to do its job. For static documentation, I don't think the same justification can be made, so I would agree it's unacceptable. Unless, in this specific case, the documentation is automatically generated through some other mechanism and this is the only reasonable way. But, if that was the case, I would still question if it couldn't be done at build time so dpkg could do its job. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
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