On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 08:00:21PM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote: > The policy vetoe to symlinking intends (in my interpretation) two > goals. One is to ensure that the licences don't "change" unintendidly. > This could e.g. happen if there is a global file called GPL, the > packages link there copyright statement to it, and the GPL-file is > incremented from GPL version 2 and later to GPL version 3 by just one > misbehaving program. The other is to make sure the copyright file is > always available. Both traps are avoided in the case where the > documentation directory is symlinked to the base packages directory.
What if the user has version 1 of abc installed, and version 2 of abc-doc installed, AND /usr/share/doc/abc-doc is a symlink to /usr/share/doc/abc, AND the copyright changed between version 1 and version 2? The user may lookup /usr/share/doc/abc-doc/copyright and get the wrong version. For a good example of why a copyright file might be completely changed between two versions, consider ssh when it changed over to be built from the "OpenSSH" sources. (It doesn't have a -doc package though). Also I think it is worth pointing out in this circumstance that I may want to install abc-doc even though abc is not installed or is a different version (eg. to see what the package is like before installing it). -- Brian May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>