Re: I'd like to coordinate a major update of stable
Hi,
[Sorry for the delay in this reply]
>>"Joey" == Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> writes:
Joey> We continued talking about this and had an idea about the
Joey> /usr/share/doc transition. I realize it's a bit late for these
Joey> with the issue in the technical committe, but this is a bit
Joey> different since it's effectively a non-technical
Joey> compromise. The idea is this: In this new update to stable,
Joey> include updated versions of dwww, doc-base, man, and whatever's
Joey> necessary to make documentation located in /usr/share be easily
Joey> accessable. Then if someone wants to install a potato package
Joey> and see docs, we just tell them to upgrade to this version of
Joey> stable first.
Joey> I think I'm one of the major instigators of the whole /usr/share/doc
Joey> concern, and while this idea isn't perfect for me, I think it's a workable
Joey> compromise, and I would accept it.
I have several technical reservations about this proposal.
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Firstly, it does not address the problem.
I realize that people are having trouble unstanding exactly
what the problem is that was presented (to which the symlink proposal
was a solution). Since it appears that I have been less than limpid,
I shall try and expand on the problem as I see it.
The problem is not a major one. It has to do with the degree
of frustration involved in readin the docs (merely changing the
location of the docs is not really a problem -- one learns the new
location quickly enough)
I find that whenevver there are two locations to get
documentation from (user visible locations, that is -- I don't really
care where man gets my man pages from), then murphy's law states that
the docs will be in the last place I try.
Enough people seem to agree that that is a problem for the
policy group to try to find a solution.
I fail to see how Joey's solution addresses this issue.
With the symlink proposal, people in potato look in /usr/doc, no
matter what. In woody, they can look at both places, /usr/doc, and
/usr/share/doc, and begin to transitions. Post woody, they look in
/usr/share/doc. All through the transition, one can look in a single
dir to get the docs about any package (the location changes, but at
any given time I can select one dir and be done).
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``Any other packages that use /usr/share/doc'' is a nebulous
concept (did you know that emacs can have native man page display?),
and we are sure to miss a number before the november freeze. The
symlink proposal gives us a full release cycle to seek and upgrade
any such functionality.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, if this relese is going to be 2.2, this takes care of my
next concern, which is:
It requires a mini-upgrade before partially upgrading to
potato. If there was no alternative, one could live with this, but
this is not a requirement of the symlink proposal.
Secondly, this requires that one upgrade to the undates --
which means that the people who upgrade from CD's are going to be out
in the cold (I am in touch with a number of people in India who uploy
upgrade from CD's -- too low a bandwidth. There are people behind
corporate firewalls that can't easily use apt-get because of company
policy).
Again this is not a major hassle -- but we are trying to make
upgrades hassle free.
manoj
--
"An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to
New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide
but not new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax." David Letterman
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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