[arch-dev-public] Man page symlinks

[Aaron Griffin]

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 <jan at jgc.homeip.net> 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?