/usr/share

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>]

Hi,

As I recall, the whole idea behind /usr/share, and indeed /usr itself, 
is that it can be NFS-mounted in a read-only fashion by other
computers on a network.  This is certainly a great idea, but I have to 
ask: why does Debian not support this?

dpkg is not very smart when it comes to these things.  If you install
package A on the server, you probably have to install package A on the 
each client as well (unless it is *entirely* contained in /usr or
/usr/share, as the case may be).  Well, this is not good, because dpkg 
will barf when refused permission to touch /usr.

How can we deal with this?  Also, what about the issue of keeping
packages in sync between server and client?

Thanks,
John