On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Santiago Vila wrote:
> For most of my packages, I have to change just one line in
> debian/rules to be FHS-compliant. With your proposal, the amount of
> work is not doubled by maybe multiplied by three or four.
How many hundreds of packages do you maintain? I think this discussion
takes much more time than adding the few lines to postinst/prerm. This
can be done by debhelper and if you do prefer to do this per hand,
it's only a little bit copy&paste.
> We don't have to be FSSTND-compliant. We have to be FHS-compliant.
We have to provide a usable distribution.
It seems to be impossible to make the distribution fully FHS compliant
until potato is released, so we look for some compromise until
everything is FHS compliant.
> Being FHS compliant for manpages and info and FSSTND-compliant for
> docs would be a really ugly mix.
Having some packages FHS compliant for doc and others FSSTND compliant
for doc is much more ugly.
> For /usr/info and /usr/man, we have changed the tools which browse
> those hierarchies so that they accept both old and new packages.
> What are we unable to do the same for /usr/doc?
So you want to change tcsh to find /usr/doc/<package>/* when I enter
/usr/share/doc/<package>/<TAB>? I ask this, because that's exactly the
way I try to read the documentation of <package>.
> Suppose I have a break of free time for Debian development, I can
> either:
> a) Convert four of my packages to FHS following current policy or
> b) Convert only two of my packages to FHS following your proposal.
If you don't have enough time to maintain all your packages you should
think about giving some of them for adoption?
One of our (Debian) advantages over other distributions is, that we
have a large number of developers, so every developer doesn't have too
much packages to maintain and every maintainer has much time for every
single package. If you maintain more packages than you have time for,
you should think about giving away some packages.
> I think it is *this* proposal what will slow down the transition to
> FHS. If we do not make symlinks, transition period will be much
> shorter, and many more packages will be converted by the time potato
> is released.
It doesn't make a difference whether 10% or 90% of the packages are
FHS compliant. There are always some packages, which documentation can
not be found in the directory, where the other packages documentation
is located in. This is annoying and it is unacceptable for our users.
Don't forget that we don't make this distribution only for ourselves,
but also for our users.
> Considering that packages using /usr/doc are currently buggy because
> we have already accepted FHS, this means potato will have less bugs
> if we do not make any symlinks.
It's only a question of definition. If we define /usr/doc/<package> to
be a acceptable for the transition period, this is not a bug.
Ciao
Roland
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