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