Re: What is the purpose of MANINSTALL?

[David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2022 at 12:25:54AM +0200, Roland Illig wrote:
 > 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?

It is leftover from base and, as there, is supposed to be used to
control whether cat pages (and/or also html pages) are installed.

Fixing the lintpkgsrc package to do this whatever the current pkgsrc
way is instead (not sure what that is) is probably the right thing to
do.

Also, if there are expandos in the man page such that caching a
preformatted version of it is a problem, just delete the preformatted
version and build it at install time. Probably better to add mandoc to
USE_TOOLS conditionally to avoid maybe building it if it's not going
to be used, but even that probably isn't critical.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost