What is the purpose of MANINSTALL?

[Roland Illig <roland.illig%gmx.de@localhost>]

Hi,

The variable MANINSTALL is not mentioned in the pkgsrc guide, and its
"documentation" in mk/help/man.help (which I wrote myself 15 years ago)
is less than helpful.

What is the purpose of that variable? What feature would pkgsrc lose if
that variable were to be removed?

The background of my question is that in pkgtools/lintpkgsrc, there is a
preformatted manual page lintpkgsrc.0, which is already older than the
corresponding lintpkgsrc.1.  When I added a placeholder @MAKECONF@ to
lintpkgsrc.1 and regenerated lintpkgsrc.0 from it, that placeholder was
transformed to _^H@_^HM_^HA..., which makes it difficult to replace.
Not impossible, just difficult and unelegant.

Therefore I asked myself what would be better: To invent an ugly hack
for replacing the backspace characters in lintpkgsrc.0 or to just forget
about that file and remove it from the package.  But since I don't know
who might need that file, I cannot estimate how bad this second way
would be.

Roland