Re: Splitting man pages
On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 06:55:38PM +0100, blacksheep wrote:
> I had to wrote a lot of man pages for a multiple-binary package.
> They have to include all the same portion of text for full
> explanation. A first solution I found was to provide an
> additional troff document which any man page would include as
> follows:
>
> .so additional.1
>
> But lintian shout out something like:
>
> WHAT IS THAT FOR ? You should not provide a mapage with no
> corresponding binary !
>
> For me it is _very_ important to provide such informations in a
> separate file, as further modifications will reflect on any
> page, without the need for editing each one by hand.
>
> My advocate suggested a different solution; is it legal to
> write something like:
>
> .so /usr/share/<package-name>/additional.1
>
> in a man page ? What solution would be cleaner to adopt ?
That should be legal, but it strikes me as a little odd. How about
build-depending on groff-base and preprocess your man pages using soelim
at build time so that additional.1 gets included in the page installed
as part of the binary package? That way you can write your documents as
you suggested originally but you don't have to worry about where to put
additional.1.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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