Chapter 12. Documentation

101

should be installed under

/usr/share/

package

/

with symbolic links from

/usr/share

/doc/

package

.

/usr/share/doc/

package

may be a symbolic link to another directory in

/usr/share

/doc

only if the two packages both come from the same source and the first package Depends

on the second.

4

Former Debian releases placed all additional documentation in

/usr/doc/

package

. This has

been changed to

/usr/share/doc/

package

, and packages must not put documentation in

the directory

/usr/doc/

package

.

5

12.4 Preferred documentation formats

The unification of Debian documentation is being carried out via HTML.

If your package comes with extensive documentation in a markup format that can be converted

to various other formats you should if possible ship HTML versions in a binary package, in

the directory

/usr/share/doc/

appropriate package

or its subdirectories.

6

Other formats such as PostScript may be provided at the package maintainer's discretion.

12.5 Copyright information

Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright and distribution

license in the file

/usr/share/doc/

package

/copyright

. This file must neither be com 

pressed nor be a symbolic link.

In addition, the copyright file must say where the upstream sources (if any) were obtained.

It should name the original authors of the package and the Debian maintainer(s) who were

involved with its creation.

A copy of the file which will be installed in

/usr/share/doc/

package

/copyright

should

be in

debian/copyright

in the source package.

/usr/share/doc/

package

may be a symbolic link to another directory in

/usr/share

/doc

only if the two packages both come from the same source and the first package Depends

on the second. These rules are important because copyrights must be extractable by mechanical

means.

4

Please note that this does not override the section on changelog files below, so the file

/usr/share/

package

/changelog.Debian.gz

must refer to the changelog for the current version of package in question. In practice,

this means that the sources of the target and the destination of the symlink must be the same (same source package

and version).

5

At this phase of the transition, we no longer require a symbolic link in

/usr/doc/

. At a later point, policy

shall change to make the symbolic links a bug.

6

The rationale: The important thing here is that HTML docs should be available in some package, not necessarily

in the main binary package.