Re: [TCLUG:15556] Filesystem structures (was: [TCLUG:15481] Faeriedist)

[Kevin Bullock <kbullock@ringworld.org>]

On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Dave Sherohman wrote:

> Actually, when installing packages recently, I've seen apt spitting out a lot
> of 'Warning:  Files under /usr/doc are no longer supported' messages.
> Apparently, they've decided to take away even that.

Well, close. dpkg spits out that message because Debian is working on
being fully FHS-compliant, and getting rid of FSSTND. The *FHS* packages
make symlinks to their /usr/share/doc directory in /usr/doc, not the
other way round.

> Me neither.  Standards are a good thing.  However, when the standard says you
> have to look in N places (man, info, /usr/doc, /usr/share/doc...) to find
> information of a certain type, my appreciation of the standard decreases
> exponentially as N increases.

Very true, and finding docs can be annoying even on a fully standardized
system, but as has been implied previously on this thread, this seems like
a bigger problem than directory structure standards. Personally I like the
idea of documenting everything in SGML so you can easily produce docs in
anything else (even though that means I should learn how to do it in SGML
;p ).

> Even if /usr/share/doc is the standard, /usr/doc just *feels* right to me.
> First time I saw it, it clicked and made perfect sense.  I now know to go to
> /usr/share/doc instead (or at least first), but it doesn't have that gut-level
> 'it makes sense' feel to it, even if we ignore the probability that /usr/doc
> will continue to be used for 'non-shared' documentation, leaving poor users
> and admins to try and deduce whether the documentation they're looking for is
> considered to be 'shared' or not.

There's something to be said for this. /usr/doc is what I was 'raised on'
too, and it feels 'right'. One small correction though: on a fully
FHS-compliant system (which Debian is going for), /usr/doc wouldn't be
there (in my understanding), except maybe to solve some problems for
distributed systems. And problems for distributed systems tend to be
solved (usually pretty well) by local admins.

</nitpick>

Pacem in Terris / Mir / Shanti / Salaam / Heiwa
Kevin R. Bullock