On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 17:14:14 +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > 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.
Even though I'd personally agree with all this reasoning, it's basically a moot point considering that dqs has been removed from unstable on Mon, 12 Jan 2004 22:43:15 -0500 with "ROM; very old, non-free, doesn't work." and thus now only exists in oldstable. So, I guess this bug could simply be closed. HTH, Flo
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