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}. 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. ~spot -- Tom "spot" Callaway: Red Hat Senior Sales Engineer || GPG ID: 93054260 Fedora Extras Steering Committee Member (RPM Standards and Practices) Aurora Linux Project Leader: http://auroralinux.org Lemurs, llamas, and sparcs, oh my! -- Fedora-packaging mailing list Fedora-packaging@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-packaging
