I wrote: > It occurs to me that upgrading a package should delete old versions > of user-uncompressed doc and info files.
Santiago Vila wrote: > The package system is not supposed to read your mind. > > You should never uncompress files "in place" because then dpkg will be > unable to remove the files which belong to a certain package when it is > removed or replace by a new one. I wrote back: > But... That was my point! > > Uncompressing docs or info is *not* unusual, nor should it be frowned > upon. We should accommodate the possibility of that happening. The same > way that a properly-configured Emacs will read-in a compressed file > correctly, dpkg should treat an uncompressed file as the same and upgrade > it. Craig Sanders wrote: > no tool will ever be smart enough to cope perfectly with users leaving > crud all over the disk. > > users should uncompress their files to /tmp or under /usr/local or some > other more suitable location. if they choose to do otherwise, then > they should accept the consequences of their actions and deal with it > themselves. So, at least Craig Sanders and Santiago Vila are so engrained into Debian that they now think the original usable file is the gzip'ed one, not the author's original text. I disagree. Sure, dealing with uncompressed files on upgrade is a special case. Sure dpkg should have to be changed, or maybe /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list file could have regular expressions, like: /usr/info/emacs-e20-2(.gz)? Mike Stone wrote: > Hmm. We have zless to less gz'd files. You see, I didn't even know about that program! > Magicfilter will print them, as > will a2ps (maybe some others will too, haven't tried it.) Netscape reads > them, so does lynx. And of course man and info work with them. zgrep > will grep them. vim reads them just fine. I'm drawing a blank on things > I can't do with .gz'd files... - A new user won't know about special setups needed for emacs, less and other program. - When I switched to Debian, I used ghostview and not gv for postscript (out of luck there too). - A new user may need the docs on a crippled system, or on a system with only the base system installed. - If you are using some docs often on a 486, you end up uncompressing them because it's too slow otherwise. I'm not arguing that dpkg should handle .aux files files behind after someone has latex'ed docs. I'm arguing that the `intent' of packaging a compressed file is to have the uncompressed original available on the system. Debian upgrades should therefore acknowledge the possibility that files have been decompressed. -- Peter Galbraith, research scientist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Maurice Lamontagne Institute, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada P.O. Box 1000, Mont-Joli Qc, G5H 3Z4 Canada. 418-775-0852 FAX: 775-0546 6623'rd GNU/Linux user at the Counter - http://counter.li.org/