Well we arn't getting anywhere at all with a good transition to /usr/share/doc, but perhaps this will be easier.
I'm concerned about what happens when packages start using /usr/share/man. Suppose I convert alien to put it's man pages there. Alien is arch independant and there is no reason someone using stable can't install the latest version from unstable. But when they do, they discover they can no longer read alien's man page, becuase their old man browser doesn't grok /usr/share/man. What to do? One idea that comes to mind is to make any package that uses /usr/share/man depend on some package. This might be "man-db (>= 2.3.10-69g)" which is the first version that support /usr/share/man. Or it might need to be some other package which itself conflicts with old versions of all the man browsers out there, to ensure only new ones are installed. The problem with this idea of course is it means the majority of packages have a dependancy added to them. This doesn't seem like a large drawback in my eyes, especially because the average package depends on (checks) 2.57 packages already and it dpkg seems to be handling that fine. What do people think? -- see shy jo
