Regarding the share/doc proposal. My apologies if this repeating someone else's comments, I have not read all the messages in the threads.
On Fri, Jul 16, 1999 at 02:35:04PM -0700, Joey Hess wrote: > Usr/share/doc vs. /usr/doc (#40706) > * Under discussion. > * Proposed by Manoj Srivastava; seconded by Joey Hess. > * /usr/doc has moved, and we want to have a good transition to > /usr/share/doc without breaking backwards compatability and > incremental upgrades. This proposal is to make each package manage > the transition on its own by managing a /usr/doc/package -> > /usr/share/doc/package symlink. At some future date, all these > links will be removed. > ( Several proposals have been posted to this bug report, I am > covering only the latest one. ) Has no one seriously considered the mess that will happen if you try to follow this path (namely, making each package manage the transition by itself)? Think about all the typos (like "[-L foo]") that people are going to make, the number of link-handling scripts that bomb out or do the wrong thing, the number of unwanted symlinks that will be lying around once the dust settles, and the crap that will live in the maintainer scripts forever (well, a long time). Think about how few maintainers test their scripts exhaustively (for idempotency etc.) (when doing upgrade, new install, failed-upgrade, configure, remove, purge, etc.). I will oppose the proposal unless it contains code fragments that a) have been thoroughly tested, b) have been shown to be the only real solution, and c) will be mandated. One question, does the FHS permit "/usr/share/doc -> ../doc" ? If so, there is a very simple solution (forbid the use of /usr/share/doc and have base-files contain this symlink; this does not address mount and partition issues). A better solution (than the proposed one) would be one that has all the code in only one place and the opportunity to fail at only one time. Alas, I do not have such a thing. Unfortunately, various people have pre-empted the policy discussion and have started using /usr/share/doc already. Giuliano.
