Docs in 'share'

[Dave Sherohman <esper@usinternet.com>]

So much for this topic being dead...  Subject changed so uninterested parties
can more easily ignore it.

^chewie said:
> Wow are you acidic today.

Nah, it's not just today (or yesterday, or whenever I orginally bitched about
it).  'share' is just a pet peeve.  As I mentioned earlier, /usr/doc/ makes
perfect sense to me, while /usr/share/doc feels wrong.

I suppose I'm still annoyed over having all (well, a large portion of) my
documentation moved on me when I did my first slink->potato upgrade,
particularly as it was done, AFAICT, without any warning that it would be
done or notice that it had been done.  (Yeah, yeah, I know...  I probably
should've read the policy manual before changing from (at that time) stable
to unstable.  But, again, until this discussion, I've never once seen anyone
state, "You should read the policy manual."  I'd always assumed that it
contained developer info, not user info and, since I have no intention of
becoming a Debian developer in the foreseeable future, I paid it no mind.)

> If you follow Debian at all, you will know that the
> /usr/share/doc is the final destination of package documentation,

ISTR having heard a rumor at one point that the next version after potato
(this was before woody had been named) would be moving everything back to
/usr/doc.  I guess that rumor was false.

Does subscribing to debian-user, debian-news, debian-changes, and
debian-announce qualify as "follow[ing] Debian at all"?  I haven't seen this
mentioned on any of those lists.  (That's probably where I saw the 'going
back to /usr/doc' rumor, but I didn't see a refuation of it...)

> This brings up a good point.  Debian has an estabilished, published policy for
> the distribution.  Do all packages automatically get updated when new policy is
> established?  No.  The package maintainers are human.  They may actually have
> lives.  

I certainly hope the majority of them do.  This particular change, though,
would (at least superficially) seem easy to automate.

> Debian itself has gone through some growing pains recently.  It's popularity
> and demand has grown such that the management model for Debian maintainers no
> longer held water.  They quit accepting applications for new package
> maintainers.  These problems and growing pains seem to have been resolved and
> applications are once again being processed, which is good news for many.

Really?  Where has this been discussed?  Again, I never saw any mention of
these problems on any of the Debian lists I'm subscribed to.  I'll admit that
I ignore quite a bit of what goes on, but any subject lines mentioning Debian
growing too fast, a freeze on new maintainers, or other problems of the sort
you're referring to would have probably caught my eye.

> As far as the /usr/share and /usr/local/share directories are concerned.  These
> are directories for files that are not platform dependent.

The examples you gave make sense to me, but it's because icons, sounds, etc.
are reasonably sharable across _applications_ which, to me, is what the
'share' designation implies.  And there's still the question of programs like
ps, where the documentation can be considered platform-specific, since
different *nix flavors have significantly-differing syntax.

-- 
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