On Mon, 17 Jan 2005, Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:

> > I have my pkgsrc patched for maybe a year to honor a PKGMANDIR variable
> > which I set on some systems to share/man (and defaults to just "man").
> >
> > Then for GNU_CONFIGURE packages I add:
> > CONFIGURE_ARGS+=  --mandir=${PREFIX}/${PKGMANDIR}
> >
> > I have several packages patched to also honor my PKGMANDIR.
> >
> > I'd like to get this committed all to pkgsrc, but didn't receive much
> > (any?) feedback when I provided patches and discussion before.
> >
> > This is similar to the configurable "info" directory (but in some cases is
> > not as easy).
>
> I don't think we should make that configurable for consistency reasons,
> and to avoid potential breakage due to packages not properly honoring
> the setting.  Better stick to a policy and apply it.  (Though,
> personally, I'd like to see 'man' and 'info' moved inside PREFIX/share;
> we even do this in the base system.)

Maybe we can document that it is experimental.

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005, Johnny Lam wrote:

> Yes, I would prefer that we do it all either one way or the other.
> Having experienced the pain of PKG_SYSCONFBASE and VARBASE, I would much
> rather that we not have Yet Another Variable to tweak the /usr/pkg
> hierarchy and have to fix lots of packages to deal with the new
> variable.
>
> As for whether we should move 'man' and 'info' into ${PREFIX}/share, I
> would rather that we not do that.  The way that it is right now is
> rather low maintenance since we match the defaults and expectations for
> quite a lot of packages, and I don't see any real benefit to moving them
> at this point in the pkgsrc timeline.

One thing to note is that we have several packages that are forced to
install to ${PREFIX}/man/... so changing them to use a variable for "man/"
doesn't change much.

Also since many packages builds already honor autoconf configure's
--mandir, it works instantly for many.

I don't see how it will make it harder for anyone in the long run. It can
be experimental for now and who ever wants to work on it can. For new
packages, just document to use ${PKGMANDIR} instead of hard-coded "man"
for INSTALLATION_DIRS, etc.

I made it so PLIST entries starting with man/ match up to my ${PKGMANDIR}
so I don't have to change any PLISTs.

I could also make it so INSTALLATION_DIRS use of hard-coded "man/" are
automatically converted, but it would probably be better to just use a
variable there.

I have been doing this for about eight or nine months.

Someone else had posted about it using same variable name:
 http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2003/01/06/0024.html

Of course, I could just use a single symlink. But again since INFO_DIR
exists and works, maybe we should consider doing the same for man pages.

 Jeremy C. Reed

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