why the common-->../common symlink in doc dirs?

[Tobi Vollebregt]

Hi,

I've been wondering why KDE installs a symlink "common" pointing to
"../common" directory  in every apps' documentation directory. For
example, for konqueror, /usr/share/doc/kde/HTML/en/konqueror/common
points to /usr/share/doc/kde/HTML/en/common (ie. "../common").

I've been investigating this after an issue with KDE 3.4.1 packages on
Kubuntu (see bug http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109143 ). This,
combined with my own experience developing kio-locate, shows that it
is prone to errors of packagers and  build system authors.

So, I think this symlink is not needed because:

* it's prone to errors, as shown above.
* in the help file of an application, you know the common directory is
in ../common
* image links in the generated html point to the global common
directory, not to the application's common directory.
* meinproc can be patched to generate the right links when it sees
&underGPL; &underFDL; and other tags for an URI containing "common" is
generated. Currently it generates eg.
help:/appname/common/gpl-license.html. This should be changed to
help:/common/gpl-license.html.

What needs to be done to remove it:

* all occurences of help:/appname/common/foo must be found, in
meinproc and possibly in the module(s) that generate html from
.docbook files.
* these need to be replaced by help:/common/foo
* the buildscripts can be modified to not install this symlink.

What about it?

Is there any reason which requires KDE to use all these symlinks
instead of generating the right URIs?

thanks

Tobi Vollebregt