[Fedora-packaging] Installing man pages

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Wed Sep 28 02:00:15 UTC 2005


On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 12:09 -0500, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 18:10 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote: 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > A question:
> > 
> > Are packages legitimated to install man pages into
> > arbitrary /usr/share/man/man* directories outside those provided by the
> > "filesystem" package?
> 
> Short answer: Yes, but only in specific cases.
> 
> > I checked the FHS, but it once again seems intentionally vague to me
> > wrt. this topic, so I think we need a convention, here.
> 
> OK... so the FHS says:
> 
> http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRSHAREMANMANUALPAGES
> 
> "Manual pages are stored in <mandir>/<locale>/man<section>/<arch>."
> 
> Where <mandir> = /usr/share/man
> 
> "Systems which use a unique language and code set for all manual pages
> may omit the <locale> substring and store all manual pages in <mandir>.
> For example, systems which only have English manual pages coded with
> ASCII, may store manual pages (the man<section> directories) directly
> in /usr/share/man. (That is the traditional circumstance and
> arrangement, in fact.)"
> 
> "Similarly, provision must be made for manual pages which are
> architecture-dependent, such as documentation on device-drivers or
> low-level system administration commands. These must be placed under an
> <arch> directory in the appropriate man<section> directory; for example,
> a man page for the i386 ctrlaltdel(8) command might be placed
> in /usr/share/man/<locale>/man8/i386/ctrlaltdel.8."
> 
> Or, to put it in plain english:
> 
> If you have man pages that are only in EN (the most common case), then
> you need to put them in %{_mandir}/man<section>, where the section
> matches the section in the man pages. This is what lapack/blas does.
> 
> If you have man pages that are provided in multiple locales, then they
> need to be put in %{_mandir}/<locale>/man<section>, where the locale and
> section matches the section in the man pages. Man does this for some of
> its translated man pages.
> 
> If you have man pages that are architecture-dependent (aka, only true
> for a specific architecture), then they should be placed in
> %{_mandir}/<locale>/man<section>/<arch>. I'm not aware of anything doing
> this, but this is not surprising, since this is a very obscure case.
> 
> FE Packages should not own any directories under %{_mandir}.

That's the crucial point.

IMO, packages must own directories if they install their manpages
outside of those directories provided by "filesystem".

>  I'm also
> aware that many directories under /usr/share/man are not owned. This
> should be filed as a bug against the "man" package, IMHO, but this seems
> to be a point of much contention inside Red Hat.
> 
> Again, I can't control FC packaging policy (unfortunately), just FE. If
> nothing else, we'll set a good example for Red Hat.

blas and lapack are FE packages.

Ralf





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