[Fedora-packaging] Installing man pages

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 14:36 +0800, Jeff Pitman wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 September 2005 10:00, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > IMO, packages must own directories if they install their manpages
> > outside of those directories provided by "filesystem".
> 
> Just thought I'd throw my 2c in here: making sure that there is a 1:1 
> mapping for pkg to directory is a bit pedantic.
That's not the problem, ... 
the problem is "unowned files/dirs" ...

>   What problem are we 
> (as in packagers) actually trying to solve?
... the problem is "unowned files/dirs contradict maintainability".

As RH handles directories pretty lax, when looking closely into your
system, you permanently find unowned files and directories, and
permanently are facing the question like
* Is this empty directory still in use or did a temporarily/formerly
installed package leave it around?
* What has caused this dangling symlink?
* Where does this unowned file stem from?
etc. etc.

To check, you'd normally apply "rpm -qf <dir>". However due to RH's
policy this is of very limited use and forces you to dig deeply into
your file system.

> rmdir will always fail upon package removal if a directory is in the 
> %files section.  This is silent and not visible to the user.
That's news to me - How that?

I aware that rpm has problems in scheduling directory removals and
scheduling multiple package removals, which can cause "rmdir" to fail
sometimes, because they are not handled in correct order.
But in any case, rpm should be able to handle "rpm -e <one package>"
correctly.

Ralf