On 11 October 2013 19:47, Paul Gevers <elb...@debian.org> wrote:

> Anyway, why does dx need/use the symlink
> if it can, apparently, function well without the data.
>

If dx-doc and dxsamples are not installed, dx still functions, except that
the online help and samples are not available.
My reasoning was that if either dx-doc or dxsamples were installed on their
own, without dx, there would be no change in their functionality whether
the symlinks were present or not.  The help and samples functions in dx,
however, would not work if the symlinks were missing.


>  Yes, but apart from thinking about how you would like it to be, you are
> here also changing the way it used to be. This always has additional
> risks, so usually, I would only do it if it would bring real benefits.
> We already saw the potential risk when it was forgotten to declare the
> proper replaces/breaks.
>

I had a close look at the locations of files in the dx package and found
that most of the directories installed in /usr/lib/dx actually belonged in
/usr/share/dx.  Unfortunately I found no easy way to separate binaries and
arch-independent files in dx's build system, so I tried building with
prefix=/usr/share instead of prefix=/usr/lib and was pleased by the results.
No symlinks were required for dx to locate its samples and the
image-file-in-usr-lib Lintian warnings were silenced because /usr/lib/dx/ui
was now at /usr/share/dx/ui.  I hope these benefits outweigh the risks of
changing the prefix.

I already did a long time ago :) http://bugs.debian.org/683059 Maybe YOU
> want to add a note about Suggests.
>

Thanks, I will follow up in that bug.

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