Re: Symlinked manpages

[Ian Jackson <iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk>]

Herbert Xu writes ("Symlinked manpages"):
> In a number of packages (such as gcc-2.6.3-3), there are symlinked
> manpages.  It seems that this could (and should) be replaced by the
> .so directive as that would enable man to share the cat pages between
> two manpages.  So could all package maintainers whose package contains
> symlinked manpages use '.so' instead, please?

If the man program can't handle sharing catman pages produced from
symlinked manpages it should be fixed.  (It seems to me that this is a
lot easier, in fact, than checking for `.so' directives in the actual
files.)

In any case, symlinks are better in other respects: they are faster,
require less disk space, and are not dependent on the current
directory of the `groff' invocation.

Ian.