Bug#522827: perl: policy violation with the current /usr/share/doc symlinks

[Niko Tyni]

On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 10:45:42PM +0300, Niko Tyni wrote:
> Package: perl
> Version: 5.10.0-19
> Severity: important
 
> As revealed by lintian, shipping /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright
> in perl-base and symlinking /usr/share/doc/perl-base -> perl
> is a policy violation.

> The best fix I can see is something like
> 
> perl-base    /usr/share/doc/perl-base/copyright
> perl-base    /usr/share/doc/perl-base/changelog.Debian.gz
> perl-base    /usr/share/doc/perl/Documentation (and others in perl/)
> perl         /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright
> perl         /usr/share/doc/perl/changelog.Debian.gz
> perl         /usr/share/doc/perl/Changes.gz (and others in perl/)
> perl-modules /usr/share/doc/perl-modules -> perl
> perl-doc     /usr/share/doc/perl-doc -> perl
> perl-doc     /usr/share/doc/perl/Changes5.000.gz (and others in perl/)

> The new perl package would need a
>  Replaces: perl-base (<= 5.10.0-19)
> but I can't see any other obvious upgrade gotchas. 

I tried this at home, and somewhat surprisingly dpkg wouldn't
remove the old perl-base -> perl symlink when upgrading perl-base.

I suppose this policy note (section 6.6.4) covers it:

  A directory will never be replaced by a symbolic link to a directory
  or vice versa; instead, the existing state (symlink or not) will be
  left alone and dpkg will follow the symlink if there is one.

I think we need to remove the symlink manually in perl-base.preinst
on upgrades.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org