I'm replying to two at once here, in the interest of efficiency. Chris Waters wrote: > Yes, that's why I suggest that we wait till after Potato, and start > the changeover at the *beginning* of a release cycle. That way we > have as much time as possible.
That was the plan the previous two releases as well :-) Chris Waters wrote: > Richard Braakman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > That last sentence is an error. When all packages have moved to > > /usr/share/doc, we can drop the symlink handling code from the > > postinst and prerm, with no loss. > > Er, no, not if the symlink handling is *in* the postinst/prerm. If > it's there, then we have to wait another release or two, in order to > support people doing partial upgrades. How so? It seems to me that we have to wait exactly one full release. When we've released a version that has all packages converted, the next release can drop all the symlinking code. > > That is because at every upgrade, the symlink is removed by the old > > package and (possibly) reinstalled by the new package. > > Ah, I see. If the symlink handling is all done by dpkg, and NOT by > postinst/prerm, then you may indeed be correct. No, it's done by postinst/prerm. dpkg can't do it if the symlink is in the data.tar.gz, because it will not replace a directory with a symlink. > > The only remaining technical objection I have to it is that it will > > fail for packages that have extra files in their /usr/doc directory, > > either due to package cruft or because the system admin put something > > there. Those packages can not make the symlink because there's still > > a real directory, and it will appear to the user that the > > documentation is simply missing. > > Won't the files just disappear? The way the contents of /dev > disappeared recently? :-) I'm not sure, I'm not about to experiment :) [philosophical discussion deleted] > But, if some of us think that we're *too* focused on releases, and > some of us (like me) think that we're not focused *enough* on > releases, then maybe we're actually striking exactly the right > balance. I dunno. :-) I don't know about a balance, but certainly we should have people watching both sides of the scale :) Richard Braakman
