Comment 4 for bug 500870

Benjamin Drung <email address hidden> writes:

> It's not forbidden in the policy, is it? CDBS symlinks the changelog
> file on Ubuntu. Quote from cdbs 0.4.62+nmu1ubuntu1:

> + Symlink /usr/share/doc/ files to identical versions in any depending
> package which is built by the source package (except copyright, to
> adhere to Debian Policy). This can be disabled by setting
> $CDBS_NO_DOC_SYMLINKING.

Debian Policy 12.7 says:

    Packages that are not Debian-native must contain a compressed copy of
    the debian/changelog file from the Debian source tree in
    /usr/share/doc/package with the name changelog.Debian.gz.

Historically, we've read this as requiring the changelog file be a real
file and not a link unless the entire /usr/share/doc directory is linked
(as allowed for in 12.3).

I think the restriction should probably be relaxed in Debian, but it needs
to go through the normal Policy change process.

--
Russ Allbery (<email address hidden>) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>