[gobolinux-users] man pages?

[hisham.hm at gmail.com]

On 8/17/07, Jonas Karlsson <jonka750 at student.liu.se> wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Aug 2007 16:44:07 +0200, kenneth marken <k-marken at online.no>
> wrote:
>
> > will this be corrected in 014 or is it be being lazy with recipes?
> >
> > i was being annoyed by some man pages not being found even if they existed
> > inside the programs dir. so i did a bit of digging.
> >
> > i found that while the available man pages where found
> > under /System/Links/Manuals, the ones i wanted where
> > under /System/Links/Shared/man.
> >
> > so i added that path to manpath in zshrc. but now i get a export dump each
> > time i open a terminal?!
> >
> > anyways, is this me not telling the recpies to put the man files in the
> > correct place, or the system not taking into account multiple locations of
> > man files?
> >
> I was going to bring this, and some other directory layout issues, up to
> discussion after 014, but as this came up now, here it goes.
>
> This issue comes from that the default path applications configured with
> autotools has changed, from PREFIX/man to PREFIX/share/man. I was about to
> commit a patch yesterday, to Compile, to change the default configuration
> options passed, so that man pages would be installed into $target/man, but
> then I started to wonder why autotools had changed its default. After some
> searching I found that is was due to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
> (http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html) had desided that man pages
> should go into /usr/share/man. As I'm for supporting FHS, not because I like
> the ideas but because I believe in making choosing GoboLinux easy*, I think
> we should adapt to this change and change where we store man pages. So,
> should we remove /System/Links/Manuals or make a symlink to/from
> /System/Links/Shared/man?

Back in the day, there used to be a separate script called
SymlinkManuals, that was called from SymlinkProgram, and which
actually scanned programs looking for man pages stored in weird
directories. This ensured that all man pages were installed correctly.
I wonder what happened to it.

About removing /System/Links/Manuals: I'm not opposed to it in a
long(er)-term view of things, but I'm not changing this in the ISO
now. In the short-term, adding support in SymlinkProgram for linking
stuff from Shared/man into /S/L/M sounds like a simpler, safer,
approach to me.

-- Hisham