On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 10:01:53AM -0800, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Richard Rauch wrote:
 [...]
> > What methods are there to avoid clashes between section-title
> > specifications of man pages?
> >
> > As I read it, only the system admin can set a man-page
> > section in /etc/man.conf, and the set defined is fairly
> > small.
> 
> A regular user can also choose their own custom man.conf and also define
> a custom MANPATH.

That won't help much if one is installing from something
like pkgsrc, though.  It seemed that there should be a
way within the package to do this.  Having a package
twiddle /etc/man.conf doesn't seem good, nor does one
want to try to modify every user's MANPATH.  (^&


 [...]
> Did you have a particular man page your were thinking about?

I recently learned that old GLUT had man-pages.  (I've never
seen them, but it might be nice to have them around.)

OpenGLUT, a project that I contributed some time to in 2004,
has a complete set of man-pages.

Because OpenGLUT is a member of the GLUT family, it has more or
less all of the original GLUT functions, some only in stub form.
But it also has extensions.  And it notes bugs/quirks that are
OpenGLUT-specific.  I.e., it really is a different (though very
similar) library.

It would be nice to be able to get both sets of man-pages installed
at once.  (Both libraries can be installed at once.)  Since
neither ship with the base system, the natural NetBSD approach
would be a pkgsrc-style set, for both cases.  (Actually, OpenGLUT
installs its own man-pages during a normal "make install".)

So I was thinking about how to avoid this problem.

Maybe one solution is to let the admin set a custom package
section in order to install both sets, and then tell one
(or both) sets of man-pages to install somewhere else than
they would normally use.  E.g.:

GLUT_MANPATH=/usr/pkg/man/glut/

...then do "man glut glutCreateWindow", or
"man glut3 glutCreateWindow"...


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/