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

[Russ Allbery]

"Brendan O'Dea" <bod at c47.org> writes:
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 5:45 AM, Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> wrote:

>> 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. [...]
>> Is there a historical reason for the current setup or is it just
>> cosmetics?  It's not causing any problems AFAIK, but I suppose we can't
>> just ignore policy here.

> This was an intentional decision and I do not believe that there is
> actually a problem here.
>
> Yes, there is potentially an issue that perl-base is a symlink, although
> I believe that this is mitigated by the fact that it links to a
> directory in the same package--so any tools as mentioned in policy (such
> as apt-listchanges) which are looking at a single package archive should
> be able to cope.
>
> Moreover, as you've found, switching symlinks to directories and vice
> versa is tricky.  I seem to recall instances where empty directories
> resulted from various update orderings.

I looked at this a couple of times and decided that it was weird, but I
could see why it was done and I couldn't see anything that it would really
break except for Lintian.  But apart from adding a special exception for
perl in Lintian, I didn't see any way of telling Lintian that it was okay.

I'd recommend against anyone doing the same thing in a new package, but
given that it already is like this, I never managed to convince myself
that the effort to change it was really worth it.

My reading of Policy is the same as Niko's: I think it's technically a
Policy violation.  But I think it still preserves the things that Policy
was intended to preserve, so it's not really much of a violation of the
spirit.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>