On Sun, 2006-08-20 at 14:15 +0200, Tilman Sauerbeck wrote:
With autoconf 2.60, the default mandir changed from /usr/man to /usr/share/man.
We decided to patch autoconf to revert this change, but I don't think this is a good idea anymore.
This issue is non-critical, and I'd like to avoid having a different autotools environment than on any other distro.
FWIW, I completely agree. Changing the behaviour of packages that are meant to produce distributable scripts is a no-go :)
We'll have to add "--mandir=/usr/man" to more configure lines in the next few months anyway, while projects update autoconf to 2.60, so it doesn't really matter if we add it to the Pkgfiles where we call autoconf ourselves.
Perhaps it should be considered to just adopt the FHS and use /usr/share/man. My personal concern about doing this (till now) has been all the damned --mandir=/usr/share/man it would take, plus patch/sed'ing some static Makefiles. I do like the fact that /usr/man is shorter, and think the FHS argument for moving it to datadir is pretty useless in a time where people use software "packages" where binaries and man-pages are bundled together. Nonetheless, it's what everybody else is doing, so it's going to require less hacks in the long run - especially now when it's the autoconf default.