>>>>> On Mon, 19 Dec 2011, Alexandre Rostovtsev wrote:

> I am forced to agree with your points #1 and #2.

Good. :-)

> $CATEGORY/$PN-$SLOT is optimized for the "bookmark a document and go
> back to it a week later" use case, but you are correct that it would
> work poorly for the "quickly look up a doc that you had not cared
> about until now" use case.

> Using /usr/share/doc/$PN-$SLOT with exceptions for packages that
> have the same ($PN, $SLOT) but different categories would not scale:
> it turns out there are >100 of them in the main tree.

Probably most of them in app-emacs and app-xemacs.

> Using /usr/share/doc/$P would be worse than the current situation:
> doc locations would still shift on minor version bumps, and packages
> with multiple slots in the same $P (e.g. webkit-gtk) would collide.

> And using $CATEGORY after $PN is simply too ugly to contemplate.

I agree.

> Fortunately, there *is* a neat solution.

> Symlinks.

> In other words: no change to dodoc/newdoc/dohtml, they will continue
> to install documentation in /usr/share/doc/$PF like they do today.

> BUT the package manager will automatically create a symlink
> from /usr/share/doc/$CATEGORY/$PN (for slot 0) or
> from /usr/share/doc/$CATEGORY/$PN-$SLOT (for slot != 0)
> to /usr/share/doc/$PF. This would have to be done after the end of
> src_install() so that the symlink goes in the VDB.

Maybe the symlinks should live in a different directory? Otherwise it
could be confusing for packages like gnustep-base or net-dns whose
name is equal to a category name.

Also I think that the slot should better be separated by a character
that cannot occur in a package name, i.e. something other than
hyphen (-), plus sign (+), or underscore (_). What was the problem
with the colon (:) again?

> I think that this change, similarly to the automatic .la file
> fixing, could be implemented by portage without waiting for a new
> EAPI.

Not sure about this one. It's not Portage only, but affects all
package managers.

Ulrich