On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 04:28:59PM +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
> On 1/2/07, Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> wrote:
> >On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 03:44:10PM +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I find it wasteful to install the same changelogs (both Debian and
> >> upstream) in binary packages which share the same sources. Why not
> >> have symlinks in place of these and perhaps an extra /usr/share/doc
> >> directory named the same as the source package in case a binary
> >> package of the same name doesn't exist.
> >>
> >> Maybe this is not the right time but then maybe someone should
> >> convince me that I'm proposing a bad idea.
> >
> > the problem is, you can only do that if you have one of the binary
> >package that is always installed with any of the other, else you will
> >have dangling symlinks, and it's prohibited by the policy (no to mention
> >that it would be quite useless !)
>
> Why not have an extra /usr/share/doc/$source-name directory in case a
> binary package of the same name doesn't exist or is not found to be
> installed. This would be a problem when dependencies change, but on
> package removal, /usr/share/doc/$source-name would be left alone if
> there remains binary packages built from that source package.
That's what $package-common packages are for. But just to hold the
copyright and changelog that's an overkill because those packages would
need some kind of garbage collection somehow and that i'm quite sure
that it would use more mirror resources than the repeated changelogs.
Well all in one it's not worth the effort, and has many drawbacks
IMHO. I'd say that's a thing you may consider when you already need a
$package-common for your packaging, but it's not necessarily a good
idea.
just to know what we are talking about, on my system:
du /usr/share/doc/*/changelog.Debian.gz: 16M
du /usr/share/doc/*/copyright: 15M
du /usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin: 15M
so well, if it's not nothing, it's still quite small, and I can't
imagine a system where 30M is an issue nowadays (well except PDA's or
so, but here the whole /usr/share/doc is an issue at once anyway, like
Don already explained it - on my system /usr/share/doc is 234M big).
--
·O· Pierre Habouzit
··O madcoder@debian.org
OOO http://www.madism.org
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