[This mail is part of Debian Policy Weekly issue #5]
Topic 4: Gzipped symlinks
STATE: APPROVAL
Current policy requires all manual pages to be installed compressed. In some
cases where a program has different names, the manual page file might be a
symbolic link pointing to another file, for example "nview.1.gz ->
nvi.1.gz".
However, in some cases the maintainers installed the links without trailing
".gz", but pointing to a gzipped file, as in "nview.1 -> nvi.1.gz". Though
this works perfectly with "man", it's completely controversal to logic (at
least for me :). However, I've been requested to clarify this in the policy
manual.
So unless someone objects, I'll add the following statement to the section
about symbolic links:
A symbolic link pointing to a compressed file should always use
the same file extension as the referenced file. (For example, if a
file called "foo.gz" is referenced by a symbolic link, the link
filename has to end with ".gz" too, as in "bar.gz".)
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