> >> Will the transformation rules be hardcoded in the man.c >> or will there be a system file which defines the transformation >> rules. >> IOW - if sbin or exe is not included in the default transformation >> rules, >> could a system administrator extend those rules? > > Currently they are hard-coded because I don't expect that these rules > will need frequent updates. However, I could see where ISV's may > want to append on things like: > > /opt/VRTSvlic/bin /opt/VRTS/man > > If this route is taken, where should the config file go? Should it > have a syntax that allows future man configuration or be a simple > two-column file with comments allowed?
The option to make the transformations configurable could be useful for other os.o distributions that have a different layout (changing a configuration file is easier to maintain than changing something in the source tree) and, come to think of it, might this not be useful for anyone delivering executables and manpages? If these transformations are configured correctly it removes the need for users to deal with MANPATH at all, though to keep things manageable some kind of wildcarding would be useful: e.g. if there's /opt/ <something>/bin in the PATH, add /opt/<something>/man to the corresponding MANPATH (except if a more specific, non-wildcarded rule applies). Whatever syntax is chosen I would expect that it would get updated automatically by packages/the packaging system, so something easily updated programmatically (but, pending those packaging software to add this information to their packages admins would need to maintain this information so ideally it should be something readable too). Bart
