Re: Proper section for perl manpages
On Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 10:59:45PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
>Duncan Findlay wrote:
>> I was wondering what the proper extensions for perl manpages are.
>>
>> My package, spamassassin, currently installs a lot of manpages in section 3
>> as *.3p.gz. In perl policy, it states that this should be *.3perl.gz, but
>> I've also noticed a large number of packages we *.3pm.gz manpages. Could
>> anyone explain what I should do, and whether all these other packages are
>> deserving of bug reports?
>
>Hm, it seems to be nearly evenly split. I had thought .3pm was ok for
>perl modules.
There are two reasons that Perl Policy bothers to explicitly indicate
the manual page extensions for sections 1 and 3:
The first is that by using "3pm" and "3perl" allows man-db to choose
library functions (3) over perl modules of the same name. There was at
least one case where this was desired (although I don't now recall it
offhand).
See the SECTION entry /etc/manpath.config .
The second is outlined in §3.1 of Perl policy. Since it is possible to
make a package of a newer version of a module which is included in the
core distribution, the packages manpages should use "1p" and "3pm" so as
not to conflict with those included with perl ("1", "3perl").
For modules which use MakeMaker, this is handled automatically.
>> Also, spamassassin has 2 manpages for daemons, and these should, as I
>> understand it, in section 8, since only system admins would run them.
>> However, perl policy seems to indicate that only section 1 and 3 can be
>> used. (I think this might have something to do with perl makefiles too.)
>> Should I move the manpages to man8?
>
>Well perl policy says to use the standard directories. The fact that it
>only bothers to list two of them does not override debian policy which
>says sysadmin stuff goes in man8.
Correct. Since neither of the issues described above affect pages in
section 8, using a suffix of "8" is appropriate (note, not "8p).
Regards,
--
Brendan O'Dea bod@compusol.com.au
Compusol Pty. Limited (NSW, Australia) +61 2 9810 3633
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