[Pkg-alsa-devel] issues in 1.0.10rc1

[Thomas Hood]

Jordi Mallach wrote:
> In alsa-tools, I've seen a few links for changelog across two lib
> packages. While that's ok, wouldn't it be better to just link the whole
> directory?


dpkg does not nicely handle the replacement of directories by symlinks
or vice versa.  Look at what had to be done in the libasound2-dev
postinst in order to deal with this problem (i.e., in order to ensure
that /usr/share/doc/libasound2-dev will be a symlink to ./libasound2/
rather than an empty directory after upgrading libasound2-dev from a
version that includes /usr/share/doc/libasound2-dev/ as a directory).

Second, suppose one has a package foo whose doc dir is a symlink to
the doc dir of another package bar.  If in the future one wants to add
files to /usr/share/doc/foo/ and not to /usr/share/doc/bar/ one has to
convert /usr/share/doc/foo/ back into a directory.  But this will
require more trickery because if /usr/share/doc/foo is a symlink then
dpkg will follow it when installing the contents of
/usr/share/doc/foo/ in the package.

I conclude that symlinking doc dirs is a PITA.

If one symlinks the individual files then one achieves similar space
savings without having to fight dpkg.  dpkg will replace symlinks with
files and files with symlinks on upgrade.  Furthermore, the copyright
file remains as a file which I suppose is slightly preferable from a
legal point of view.

Note that it is only acceptable to make the changelog a symlink if:

* the "linking" package and the "target" package are built from the
  same source
* the first package Depends on the second
* the first Depends on a version of the second whose number is
  equal to or greater than the version number of the first
  (so that the changelog contains the right entries)

In practice the only packages that satisfy these constraints are
lib packages and their corresponding -dev packages.


> alsa-utils both recommends and depends on different versions of
> lsb-base. We should drop one, but I wasn't sure about which.


When Ubuntu increases their version of lsb-base to >= 3.0-3 we can
make this a Dependency.


> I uploaded everything with the usual "stupid version number".


OK
-- 
Thomas