Re: FHS

[Harlan Stenn]

Except that datadir is for read-only architecture-independent data, and man
pages are not architecture-independent.  Granted, it is possible to
reorganize the subdirs into arch-specific subdirs, but that is not presently 
the case.  Also, different machines may have different versions of software
that requires different versions of man pages.

H
--
> Richard B. Kreckel writes:
> > On Sat, 5 Jan 2002, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > > > When upgrading some packages to AutoConf-2.52 I noticed that given
> > > > --prefix=/usr, manpages go straight into /usr/man/.  Hmm, but we got a
> > > > filesystem hierarchy standard <http://www.pathname.com/fhs/>!
> > > 
> > > But we've also got the GNU Coding Standards 
> > > <http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html>.
> > 
> > Okay, but I am unable to spot the contradiction with FHS.  For instance,
> > it says:
> > 
> > `mandir' 
> >       The top-level directory for installing the man pages (if any) for
> >       this package. It will normally be `/usr/local/man', but you should
> >       write it as `$(prefix)/man'. (If you are using Autoconf, write it as
> >       address@hidden@'.) 
> > 
> > There, $(prefix)/man would be problematic, but if the Autoconf-generated
> > configure would replace Makefile.in's @mandir@ with something appropiate
> > everybody would be merry.  Wrong?
>  
>  I think the GNU Coding standards need revision in this regard.
> 
>  While I think that FHS was initiated by the Linux camp (not sure; I'm
>  willing to be educated :), at least some commercial Unices now have the
>  man pages under /usr/share/man (with a link from /usr/man for backwards
>  compatibility), and this is exactly how I have been setting up
>  $(prefix)/man here for years, because we have a /usr/local for a variety
>  of architectures, and there's no need to have more than one copy of man
>  pages and other static, shareable data.
>