On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 03:31:19PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > [ As suggested by Policy 10.1 [1], I am forwarding this issue to > debian-devel. Please maintain the cc list in followups. ] > > Recent versions of manpages-dev include a new manpage queue.3. dqs has > been providing a manpage by this name for some time. Therefore there > is a file conflict when attempting to install both. > > manpages-dev is effectively a required package on any system where > people do development. Its contents are part of every major Linux > distribution. For us to rename the queue.3 manpage in manpages-dev would > be a negative user experience for people switching to Debian or using > a mixture of Debian and other non-Debian Linux systems. Additionally, > dqs is non-free and therefore "not part of Debian". It seems doubly > foolish for manpages-dev to rename its manpage.
I agree. There is a simple fix that can be applied to dqs with a minimum of fuss: instead of calling its man page queue.3.gz, it can call it queue.3dqs.gz (and similarly for the other overly-generally-named man pages in that package, namely cache, list, and stack). 'man 3dqs queue' or 'man -e dqs queue' will then show the version in dqs, and 'man -aw queue' will list all pages with that name. > [1] 10.1 Binaries > > Two different packages must not install programs with different > functionality but with the same filenames. (The case of two programs > having the same functionality but different implementations is handled via > "alternatives" or the "Conflicts" mechanism. See Maintainer Scripts, > Section 3.10 and Conflicting binary packages - Conflicts, Section > 7.3 respectively.) If this case happens, one of the programs must be > renamed. The maintainers should report this to the debian-devel mailing > list and try to find a consensus about which program will have to be > renamed. If a consensus cannot be reached, both programs must be renamed. Strictly this doesn't apply since 'queue' is not a binary, but obviously file conflicts are bad anyway. Perhaps policy should have a similar comment about manual pages containing a footnote documenting the extension convention above. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
