[bug #58098] [PATCH] build system man page failure

[Ingo Schwarze]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #58098 (project groff):

J William Piggott asked:

> If there were an English version of the page, then the
> arguments regarding the FHS[1] could be perused, IMO.

Correct, if you have an English original and a translation, then the English
original goes into the root and the translation goes somewhere else, but there
is no need to discuss that as we don't have any translations here.

> Does GNU have a man(1) implementation?

Not that i'm aware of.  The list of man(1) implementations i'm aware of is at
https://mandoc.bsd.lv/links.html; not listing Oracle Solaris man(1) because it
isn't free software.  Most Linux distros use man-db, some use man-1.6, a few
use mandoc.  man-db and NetBSD man are highly configurable and can be
configured according to the FHS or in totally different ways.  What is
actually done may depend on the distro and on the individual sysadmin.  mandoc
configuration is deliberately massively simpler.  In what matters here, it
follows the FHS except that it deliberately does not support character set
specifiers but only supports UTF-8.

Regarding unusual configurations, commercial Oracle Solaris is usually a
rewarding beast to look at.  On one system i have access to, this is the
default MANPATH:

/usr/man:/usr/dt/man:/usr/openwin/man:/opt/RICHPse/man:/opt/csw/man:/usr/sfw/man

/usr/man is a symlink to /usr/share/man and has over 200 subdirectories, but
none of those are locale-releated.  It is really hard to make any general
statements.

> I would be interested to see a list of who does and who does not.

Sorry, i haven't done full research on that, and i'm not aware of any site
comparing different systems in that respect.

Fortunately, none of this is relevant in the present context because groff
does not contain any translated manual pages in the first place, so installing
all in the root is just fine.

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