[crux-devel] autoconf mandir patch

[Mark Rosenstand]

On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 10:21 +0200, Johannes Winkelmann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 13:29:02 +0200, Mark Rosenstand wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-08-20 at 14:15 +0200, Tilman Sauerbeck wrote:
> [...]
> > > 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.
> While I prefer /usr/man over /usr/share/man, I hardly ever access the
> man pages directly (i.e. using their absolute path), so the extra effort
> to move man pages around might not really be worth it.

Neither do I, but they do account for a large number of bytes in the
footprints and /var/lib/pkg/db. Only using a single directory is The
Right Thing[tm], the question is which.

> However, there are a couple of packages which don't use autotools, so if
> we want a single location for man pages (which seems the only viable
> goal to me) we'll have to adjust some packages either way.

I thought /usr/man was already *the* mandir on CRUX. At least I've
always moved them in there for my ports.

> Evaluation using http://jw.tks6.net/files/crux/check_man.sh:
>     $ sh check_man.sh /usr/ports/{core,opt,contrib} 2> /dev/null
>     -- /usr/ports/core
>     man with configure: 64
>     man without configure: 26
>     -- /usr/ports/opt
>     man with configure: 230
>     man without configure: 88
>     -- /usr/ports/contrib
>     man with configure: 158
>     man without configure: 111
> 
> What these numbers don't tell is that for autotools, it's the same
> change for every Pkgfile, while every non-autotools package is a
> potential special case, although we might be able to convince some
> upstream authors to let their packages default to /usr/share/man in the
> future, pointing at the LFS.

Most other distributions are doing that already. Since they're likely to
gradually succeed, we're probably better off just doing that too, as it
means less work/derivation in the long run.