Bug#94995: PROPOSAL] Clarifying instructions on linking man pages

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2001 at 05:11:06PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> --- policy.sgml.orig	Sat Apr 21 14:05:54 2001
> +++ policy.sgml	Sat Apr 21 18:15:04 2001
> @@ -6528,7 +6528,24 @@
>  	  absolute filenames in <tt>.so</tt> directives.  The filename
>  	  in a <tt>.so</tt> in a manpage should be relative to the
>  	  base of the manpage tree (usually
> -	  <tt>/usr/share/man</tt>).</p></sect>
> +	  <tt>/usr/share/man</tt>). If you do not create any links
> +	  (whether symlinks, hard links, or .so directives) in the
> +	  filesystem to the alternate names of the manpage, then you
> +	  should not rely on <prgn>man</prgn> finding your manpage
> +	  under those names based solely on the information in the
> +	  manpage's header.
> +	  <footnote>
> +	   <p>
> +	    Supporting this in <prgn>man</prgn> often requires
> +	    unreasonable processing time to find a manual page or to
> +	    report that none exists, and moves knowledge into man's
> +	    database that would be better left in the filesystem.
> +	    This support is therefore deprecated and will cease to be
> +	    present in the future.
> +	   </p>
> +	  </footnote>
> +	</p>
> +      </sect>
>  
>  
>        <sect>

I'll second it, but please first figure out how we're going to make
the transition.  Mass bug reporting, lintian test, announce on
-devel-announce, warning from mandb or what?

   Julian

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         Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
       Debian GNU/Linux Developer,  see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
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