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

[Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, 2011-12-18 at 23:07 +0100, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn wrote:
> Alexandre Rostovtsev schrieb:
> > Answers to anticipated questions:
> Q8: SLOT can change after the package was installed. How to handle this
> case?

I think the slotmove should happen without renaming the documentation
directory; silently moving installed files after an emerge --sync
without the user's explicit request seems a bad idea.

This means that a slotmove could result in a future file collision. If
foo-1.0 and foo-2.0 were in slot "1", and >=foo-2.0 was slotmoved from
"1" to "2", then if a user had foo-2.0 installed before the slotmove,
attempting to install foo-1.0 after the slotmove would result in a file
collision in /usr/share/doc/*/foo-1. Such collisions would have to be
resolved with the usual technique of revbumps and blockers.

However, in practice slotmoves that could cause such collisions are
infrequent. Among the 94 slotmoves for 2009 and 2010, I see only five
that would have resulted in potential file collisions in /usr/share/doc
under the proposed scheme: ati-drivers, clojure, vala, libchamplain, and
clutter-gtk. Among the several hundred slotmoves for 2011 so far, I see
*zero* that would have resulted in a collision.

It is possible that I missed some, but even then, I think that less than
10% of slotmoves - probably much less - would have been affected.

-Alexandre.