[arch-dev-public] Man page symlinks

21 Dec 2007

      Ok, Jan brought this up twice now and I want to flesh this out.

This is in relation to the filesystem/bash upgrades.

On Dec 20, 2007 4:01 AM, Jan de Groot  wrote:
...
So what does this do when /usr/man/man3 is a directory with manpages
and /usr/man/man3 is a symlink to /usr/share/man/man3 in the new package?
Shouldn't we move /usr/man to /usr/share/man in pre_install and pre_upgrade?
Firstly, I don't think we should have these symlinks in the filesystem
package at all simply because /usr/man is not specified in the FHS
anywhere. We should technically never have a /usr/man dir at the
completion of this ideal.
If a *package* installs it, fine.

By unsetting MANPATH in /etc/profile, man looks up pages via
/etc/man.conf which includes both of these directories.

In addition, by using symlinks at all, we run into the
potential-and-always-confusing-possibly-working symlink/dir
replacement stuff in pacman.

Additionally, moving the man pages isn't a good idea. makepkg will NOT
move them anymore.

So, here's what we're left with:

* Newly built packages will install to /usr/share/man
* man will search both /usr/man and /usr/share/man for man pages
* pacman -Qo will provide us with packages which need a rebuild

It allows us to phase in the FHS man pages, and not do it all in one
big lump. Backwards compat and all that.

Is this acceptable?

Aaron Griffin

Dan McGee

Travis Willard

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