Gap in FHS (man-pages)

[Johannes Poehlmann <johannes@caldera.de>]

Gap in FHS (man-pages)

It is recommended to put all man-page sources in a path
like /usr/share/man/<locale> inluding the english ones.

What is meant to happen, 

o  if the english man-page sources are 
   stored under /usr/share/man/en and LANG is 
   set to "C" or "" ?

o  if the english man-page sources 
   are stored under /usr/share/man/en_US and  
   LANG is set to "en" ?

o  if the german man-page sources 
   are stored under /usr/share/man/de_DE.88591 and  
   LANG is set to "de_DE" ?

In general: if the locale pathname component of the man-page
sources is longer then the locale string, there must be a default
defined by someone (if there is more then one possible suffix
to complete the locale pathname component).


Is this already adressed by glibc2.2 ? 

One way to deal with would be to require symlinks from
any shorter pathname component to the "real" pathname component.

So the man-readers would not need to guess what directory is
"meant" to search in. The only intelligence required is
to find the longest prefix of the system locale string
if there is no identical locale pathname component 
(e.g. "de_DE.88591" -> "de_DE")

o  ""    ->  en is not posible, so have man* -> en/man*
o  en    ->  en_US
o  de_DE ->  de_DE.88591

The filesystem designer decides what man-pages are found
depending of the locale set. 

There may be even reasons to make the shorter pathname
components real subdirectories instead of links. One
reason could be to have seven bit clean man-page sources 
in the short named directories. 

As an example "de_DE" would not be a link to "de_DE.88591" 
but a real subdirectory. This would make the man-pages in 
de_DE.88591 only visible with LANG = "de_DE.88591".

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