"Brendan O'Dea" <[email protected]> writes: > On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 5:45 AM, Niko Tyni <[email protected]> wrote:
>> As revealed by lintian, shipping /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright >> in perl-base and symlinking /usr/share/doc/perl-base -> perl >> is a policy violation. [...] >> Is there a historical reason for the current setup or is it just >> cosmetics? It's not causing any problems AFAIK, but I suppose we can't >> just ignore policy here. > This was an intentional decision and I do not believe that there is > actually a problem here. > > Yes, there is potentially an issue that perl-base is a symlink, although > I believe that this is mitigated by the fact that it links to a > directory in the same package--so any tools as mentioned in policy (such > as apt-listchanges) which are looking at a single package archive should > be able to cope. > > Moreover, as you've found, switching symlinks to directories and vice > versa is tricky. I seem to recall instances where empty directories > resulted from various update orderings. I looked at this a couple of times and decided that it was weird, but I could see why it was done and I couldn't see anything that it would really break except for Lintian. But apart from adding a special exception for perl in Lintian, I didn't see any way of telling Lintian that it was okay. I'd recommend against anyone doing the same thing in a new package, but given that it already is like this, I never managed to convince myself that the effort to change it was really worth it. My reading of Policy is the same as Niko's: I think it's technically a Policy violation. But I think it still preserves the things that Policy was intended to preserve, so it's not really much of a violation of the spirit. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
