In the past, people specified 4 digits in the Standards-Version field, like `2.3.0.0'. Since any `patch-level changes' don't introduce new policy, it was thought it would be better to relax policy and only require that the first 3 digits are specified. (4 digits can still be used if someone wants to do so.)
The Debian distribution currently distributes a draft version of FHS 2.1 because several significant details have changed between the currently released 2.0 version and the to-be-released 2.1 version.
for backward compatibility, see Accessing the documentation, Section 6.4
If it is not possible to establish both locks, the system shouldn't wait for the second lock to be established, but remove the first lock, wait a (random) time, and start over locking again.
liblockfile version >>1.01
These symlinks will be removed in the future, but they have to be there for compatibility reasons until all packages have moved and the policy is changed accordingly.
The rationale: The important thing here is that HTML docs should be available in some package, not necessarily in the main binary package, though.
Why "licenses" and not "copyright"? Because /usr/doc/copyright used to contain all the copyright files, plus the four common licenses GPL, LGPL, Artistic and BSD. Now individual copyright files for packages are no longer in a common directory. Once /usr/doc/copyright is almost empty it makes sense to rename "copyright" to "licenses"
Why "common-licenses" and not "licenses"? Because if I put just "licenses" I'm sure I will receive a bug report saying "license foo is not included in the licenses directory. They are not all the licenses, just a few common ones. I could use /usr/share/doc/common-licenses but I think this is too long, and, after all, the GPL does not "document" anything, it is merely a license.
ijackson@gnu.ai.mit.edu
schwarz@debian.org
bweaver@debian.org
debian-policy@lists.debian.org