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

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

>>>>> 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.

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.

3. CATEGORY and SLOT are Gentoo specific, related to the way how we
   organise our packages. Neither of them should appear in the
   directory structure of installed packages. The problems related to
   package and slot moves (where CATEGORY or SLOT change) also show
   that something is wrong with the approach. (BTW, in the current
   system, PR is also Gentoo specific. It doesn't suffer from problems
   with package moves though.)

> Do you have a better proposal that does not rely on $PVR?

Leave things as they are. It's not perfect, but IMHO your approach
would create at least as many problems as it would solve.
Alternatively, a minimal solution would be to drop only ${PR}, i.e.
install documentation under /usr/share/doc/${P}.

Ulrich