The mtree and man pages

[Boey Maun Suang]

On 14/08/2007, at 11:17, Randall Wood wrote:

> Can we allow ${prefix}/man to be used and perhaps even set it to be  
> the preferred location for man pages since it seems to fit more  
> with the UNIX default location?

 From what I can tell, all major Linux distributions have moved to  
placing man pages into ${prefix}/share/man (either with prefix = /usr  
or /usr/local), in line with the File Hierarchy Standard [1], and  
FreeBSD [2], OpenBSD [3] and NetBSD [4] all do the same, with the  
point being to isolate all read-only architecture independent data  
into ${prefix}/share.  Indeed, Mac OS X's own hier(7) man page  
recommends the same thing.

In addition, it's not much trouble at all to make a port install man  
pages into ${prefix}/share/man; in most cases, we either pass -- 
mandir=${prefix}/share/man to configure or copy it ourselves.  (I  
suspect that most of the ports that install man pages into ${prefix}/ 
man are using configure script generated by autoconf < 2.59c, as it  
was only at that revision that it changed its default mandir to $ 
{prefix}/share/man.)  Consequently, I think we should stick with  
installing man pages into ${prefix}/share/man.

As for how to deal with the breaking of builds, however, it seems to  
me that we should either push out a revision incorporating mtree  
violation as a warning rather than an error (rescinding that when  
we've fixed the ports currently in the tree), or temporarily allow  
non-maintainers to commit patches that only change the man page  
installation location.  Hopefully one of these paths would be fairly  
convenient to implement.

KInd regards,


Maun Suang

[1] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/ 
fhs-2.3.html#USRSHAREARCHITECTUREINDEPENDENTDATA
[2] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier
[3] http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=hier&sektion=7
[4] http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?hier+7+NetBSD-current

-- 
Boey Maun Suang (Boey is my surname)
Email: boeyms at macports dot org