> Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > The dpkg-buildpackage program (and maybe autobuilders as well?) could
> > be modified so that after the .deb is built, before anything is signed
> > or similar, something like the following is done (within any necessary
> > fakeroot-type environment, of course):
>
> This ignores the issue of partial upgrades. That is the issue, modifying
> packages to use the new directories is not going to be a large problem.
>
> This is also rather pointless, as once debhelper is modified to use
> /usr/share/ a simple rebuild will make about 70% of the packages in debian
> use it. Debhelper does it cleanly. Your proposal is a horrid hack. It will
> also render md5sums files incorrect BTW.
Good points.
I would posit, though, than anyone trying to perform partial upgrades
should not be surprised by inconsistencies like this. I agree that my
proposal is a horrid hack, although it may be quite a useful one in
the situation. And the md5sums files can be handled by
perl -pi -e 's# usr/doc# usr/share/doc#'
Also, once the package is already correctly using /usr/share/doc,
dpkg-buildpackage modified in this way won't do anything. We could
also make dpkg-buildpackage put an informational tag somewhere to say
that this has been done; then it will be easy to check how many
packages are still non-conforming without this hack.
Incidentally, I like the idea of a simple script to do the work, and a
cron job running to clean things up.
But if debhelper will do the work of 70% of packages and debmake will
do another 20%, say, then we should probably just go ahead and request
everyone to do a rebuild using these updated utilities and NMU any
which still use /usr/doc. The rebuilds could even be done by the
autobuilders (with an appropriate changelog entry and notice to the
maintainer) if they haven't been done within, say, 4 weeks.
Julian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
