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
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