Re: dh_installmanpages: .so links?

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Jim Foltz wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> The manpage for dh_installmanpages says:
> 
> 	After the man page installation step, dh_installmanpages will check to
> 	see if any of the man pages are ".so" links.  If so, it changes them to
> 	symlinks.
> 
> What is a .so link and can it be used to automate the creation of symlinks
> in the man directories?

A .so link is a man page that contains only something like this:

.so man1/foo.1

This causes man to display foo.1 when the man page is asked for.
Dh_installmanpages will change these to use a symlink to eg, man1/foo.1
instead. See debian policy section 6.1 last paragraph for more info.

This cannot be used to automate links to man pages, unless you want to make
a man page in your package that contains a .so link. That'd work, but I'd
personally regard the addition of such a thing as a hack.

Currently, debhelper offers nothing to automate making symlinks between
manpages, you have to do it manually. If there's any great demand (more than
10 packages that would use it is a good start) for such a tool, I'd be
willing to code it.

-- 
see shy jo