Package: lintian Version: 1.23.27 Severity: wishlist lintian warns in a couple of places about files being placed in /usr/lib vs. /usr/share. While I appreciate that the FHS says "The /usr/share hierarchy is for all read-only architecture independent data files", I nevertheless think that these warnings are too pedantic.
Consider the intent of /usr/share. An administrator of many systems of heterogeneous architectures is intended to be able to share the /usr/share directory among them, for example using NFS. If one places architecture-dependent files in /usr/share, then clearly that is a bug because it certainly defeats that purpose. However, placing an architecture-independent file in /usr/lib or elsewhere merely wastes a little disk space on such systems. In some cases (e.g. menu files, small images, etc.), the amount of disk space involved is truly negligible in comparison to the amount of disk space required for the entire installation. In many cases, it is not at all clear to me that it is truly worth the developer time and potential for introducing new bugs required to move the files. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that we should fail to fix bugs just because "it's too much effort". Nor am I saying that the effort expended so far on moving files to /usr/share is wasted; hierarchies such as /usr/share/doc, /usr/share/fonts, and /usr/share/man are a very substantial win on heterogeneous shared systems. However, I do think that we're rapidly approaching diminishing returns on this. When the lintian warning is for a single image file in /usr/lib that requires fiddly build system changes to move (or fragile hacks in debian/ that would be liable to break on each new upstream version), I question whether this is a sensible use of developer time, and I question whether it really buys anything for administrators of heterogeneous systems. Most of the warnings in question are simple transitions in progress that are largely handled by a single debhelper command (menu-file-in-usr-lib) or are confined to a small group of packages (package-installs-nonbinary-perl-in-usr-lib-perl5). I'm not so bothered about those, since the practices for dealing with them are pretty established now. However, I do think image-file-in-usr-lib ought to be downgraded to an informative message. It's the sort of thing that bites in all sorts of random packages (see http://lintian.debian.org/reports/Timage-file-in-usr-lib.html) and is typically fiddly and varied to deal with, and a lot of the images involved are little things like icons where the effort doesn't really justify the gain; if they were embedded into executables, we likely wouldn't care. It's been a while since I was particularly involved in lintian maintenance, so I don't feel that I can change this unilaterally. What do the other lintian maintainers think of my position? Thanks, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
