Bug#522827: perl: policy violation with the current /usr/share/doc symlinks

[Brendan O'Dea]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 5:45 AM, Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> wrote:
> As revealed by lintian, shipping /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright
> in perl-base and symlinking /usr/share/doc/perl-base -> perl
> is a policy violation. [...]
> Is there a historical reason for the current setup or is it just cosmetics?
> It's not causing any problems AFAIK, but I suppose we can't just ignore policy
> here.

This was an intentional decision and I do not believe that there is
actually a problem here.

Yes, there is potentially an issue that perl-base is a symlink,
although I believe that this is mitigated by the fact that it links to
a directory in the same package--so any tools as mentioned in policy
(such as apt-listchanges) which are looking at a single package
archive should be able to cope.

Moreover, as you've found, switching symlinks to directories and vice
versa is tricky.  I seem to recall instances where empty directories
resulted from various update orderings.

--bod