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Hello, |
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|
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Currently PMS states that doman 'installs a man page into |
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the appropriate subdirectory of /usr/share/man depending upon its |
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apparent section suffix'. |
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|
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The problem is that I am unable to find a clear statement what |
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an 'apparent section suffix' exactly is and what it is not. 'foo.1' |
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example is pretty simple but how about 'foo.1p'? Should it go into man1 |
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or man1p? |
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|
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FHS seems to be a little unclear in that case too [1]. It lists a set |
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of a single-digit sections, and it mentions as well that 'some large |
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sets of application-specific manual pages have an additional suffix |
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appended to the manual page filename'. But it doesn't specify clearly |
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how to distinguish that suffix from the actual section. |
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|
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A quick check shows that autotools by default use only the first |
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character of a manpage suffix. Same does portage [2] (doman, l38 & l41), |
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however a few lines below you can see that it may expect '?f', '?p' |
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and '?pm' sections as well [3] (doman, l45). |
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|
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A quick look at /usr/share/man shows that most manpages are installed |
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into single-character section directories, including those having |
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various suffixes appended. However, the man-pages-posix package |
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installs its manpages into man?p sections. |
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|
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Moreover, sys-apps/man does allow user choosing the manpage section |
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only by the directory name. In other words, 'man 3x addch' won't work |
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as 'addch.3x.*' is installed in 'man3' but 'man 3 addch' would match |
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that page. |
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|
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That basically means that two different-suffixed versions of same-named |
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manpage are installed into the same section directory, man won't allow |
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user to choose between them. |
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|
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Now, what should PM do? Use single-character suffixes, complete ones or |
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maybe even a more complex rule? I think that should be clarified in PMS. |
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|
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[1] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.2/fhs-4.11.html#4.11.5 |
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[2] |
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http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=blob;f=bin/ebuild-helpers/doman;h=1862f83e1d51f37160372603d503a36ce8d776c4;hb=HEAD#l38 |
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[3] |
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http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=blob;f=bin/ebuild-helpers/doman;h=1862f83e1d51f37160372603d503a36ce8d776c4;hb=HEAD#l45 |
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|
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-- |
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Best regards, |
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Michał Górny |