Re: git: 0a0f7486413c - main - man: Build manpages for all architectures

On Thu, Nov 25, 2021 at 8:30 AM Andriy Gapon <avg@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On 25/11/2021 16:23, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
>  > On Thu, Nov 25, 2021 at 03:57:41PM +0200, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> >> Looking at the output I got another thought: do we need architecture sub-dir
> >> links at all now that we install manpages to a main directory?
> >> Is there any benefit to having the same manpage in a directory (like man4)
> >> and its immediate subdirectory (like man4/arm) ?
> >>
> > Hardlink not in the same directory is imho a fragile setup anyway, what if a
> > user has different mount points here, the hardlink would be broken. while there
> > is little chances someone is doing that, history told me people are doing weird
> > things and if they haven't yet, they will soon.
> >
> > I continue to think this kind of links should be 1/ symlinks, 2/ relative
> > symlinks if they are in a situation which can become a cross device issue.
>
> Yeah... but are they needed at all? :-)
>

It's handy in the sense that it'd be nice to install all arch manpages
on some machines, e.g., I develop arm stuff on amd64 and there are
some drivers that simply aren't applicable to amd64, I'd like to be
able to find those. I think the implementation is a bit odd, though,
leading into:

> I mean, whichever way we install manpages they are always installed into manX.
> I do not see a point / benefit of having another copy / link / whatever in
> manX/arch.
>

I guess I haven't read the context much here, but I don't see why
either. /usr/bin/man's built-in search behavior checks
$mandir/$machine and $mandir/$machine_arch before $mandir, it seems
like we should be leaving them there and letting man do its thing. If
you need a non-native arch then you can hopefully just poke around the
arch subdirs (presumably mostly section 4 pages) to figure it out.
There's a reason they're arch subdirs, and trying to install links or
arch-specific pages into the main $mandir is asking for trouble when
we actually have conflicting pages for whatever reason between archs.

Thanks,

Kyle Evans