Alistair Crooks wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 12:12:17PM +0200, Roland Illig wrote:
>> Why do we need the extra complexity of PKGMANDIR when a simple "man" is 
>> usually enough? The usual places for documentation (bmake help, the 
>> pkgsrc guide and the CVS log) don't answer this question.
> 
> Different platforms have different requirements - some need
> shar/man, some just man, others may require something different.
> 
> PKGMANDIR abstracts this out so you don't have to worry about
> that.

At least one developer had wanted to make LOCALBASE=/usr work and did 
not want manpages installed into /usr/man.  I believe this was the 
original motivation for the work.  There is a similar variable 
PKGINFODIR which one would probably want to set to a similar custom 
value if PKGMANDIR is so set.  To be honest, I routinely use the 
following on my systems:

	PKGMANDIR=	share/man
	PKGINFODIR=	share/info

I have already fixed many packages to honor these two knobs, and the 
process is typically extremely simple.  If we could generate a bulk 
build using the above, we'd easily be able to identify the packages that 
need to be fixed.

> It's arguable that we could have done some automatic PLIST
> manipulation, but we also have to concern ourselves with installation
> into the correct directory if that is done, and we're into much
> more complexity already.

We currently do some magic in PLIST generation so that we can say 
"man/man1/foo.1" in the committed PLIST but have it expand automatically 
into ${PKGMANDIR}/man1/foo.1 in the generated +CONTENTS file.  It's not 
difficult to automatically move the installed manpages from "man/manX" 
into ${PKGMANDIR}/manX as part of the same step (similar to the way that 
MANZ works), which would work for most packages.

	Cheers,

	-- Johnny C. Lam