Stupid, stupid, stupid Reply rules on this list... Forwarded message: (from me)
Boey Maun Suang wrote:
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 ${prefix}/share/man.
Seems very redundant to have that --mandir in each and every little Portfile. Might as well have the definition next to the default --prefix=${prefix}, so that it would automatically add --mandir=${prefix}/share/man --infodir=${prefix}/share/info ? Since that is now the mandatory location, might as well make it the default configure arguments as well...
Some ports that install into ${prefix}/man either use their own build system or plain have it hardcoded in their Makefiles. For example, MacPorts have hardcoded the location of ${prefix}/share/man in doc/Makefile, no matter what ${mandir} is ? The main reason why it didn't used to be such a big fuzz, was because of the ${prefix}/man -> share/man symlink.
--anders