Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: deprecate /usr/share/doc/$PF

[Stelian Ionescu]

On Mon, 2011-12-19 at 05:23 +0100, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Sun, 18 Dec 2011, Alexandre Rostovtsev wrote:
>
> >> Can we please avoid the bloat of another directory level here?
> >> ${CATEGORY}/${PN} will be even longer than ${PF} in most cases.
>
> > The problem is that ($PN, $CATEGORY) pairs are not unique. Think of
> > x11-terms/terminal:0 and gnustep-apps/terminal:0, or
> > app-misc/beagle:0 and sci-libs/beagle:0, or app-misc/nut:0 and
> > sys-power/nut:0. I could not think of any better solution than using
> > $CATEGORY/$PN-$SLOT.
>
> Thinking about it a little more, I believe that ${CATEGORY} shouldn't
> appear anywhere in the path of installed files, for the following
> reasons:
>
> 1. Users may not know the category of a package, therefore it's not
>    obvious for them where to find its documentation. (Think of it from
>    the perspective of a user on a multiuser system, who didn't install
>    the packages on that system.) OTOH, the name of the package (PN) is
>    obvious in most cases, since it will coincide with the upstream
>    name.

Every other distro includes the category in the package name, for
example Debian puts mod_fastcgi documentation
in /usr/share/doc/libapache2-mod-fastcgi and in practice it's really not
that big of a problem

> 2. It doesn't play well with bash completion. When searching for
>    documentation of a specific package (and only knowing PN), one can
>    currently type the pathname up to PN and press tab which will
>    complete PVR. With CATEGORY _before_ PN this would no longer work.

It's just an ls -d /usr/share/doc/*/$PN, not worth worrying about


-- 
Stelian Ionescu a.k.a. fe[nl]ix
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
http://common-lisp.net/project/iolib