Re: [dmidecode] Move man pages to /usr/share/man

[Jean Delvare]

[Petter Reinholdtsen]
> > By default, dmidecode does install them under /usr/man. I plan to
> > change this to /usr/share/man to comply with the FHS. Any objection?
> 
> Sounds good to me.  I've been doing this for the debian package since
> day one. :)

I saw that. Same for the Gentoo folks. Had you told me before, I'd have
changed that long ago.

> > While I'm there, I plan to add the README, CHANGELOG and AUTHORS
> > files to the list of installed files. These would be installed by
> > default in /usr/share/doc/dmidecode-$VERSION. I still need to figure
> > out a portable way to extract $VERSION from version.h.
> > 
> > There doesn't seem to be any mention of a directory for
> > documentation files in the FHS, but /usr/share/doc seems to be the
> > common practice among distributions. Comments anyone?
> 
> I would prefer /usr/share/doc/dmidecode/ instead of
> dmidecode-$VERSION/, as this is the common practice for Debian.  If
> you use dmidecode-$VERSION/, I will have to move it when I make the
> Debian package.

There doesn't seem to be an established standard for this. On Slackware
and Gentoo systems, the version is part of the documentation directory
name, while on Debian (and Ubuntu as a side effect) it is not. On the
programs' side, some include the version by default, some don't.

What is likely to help me decide in the end is the fact that including
the version is not as trivial as I had hoped unless I duplicate the
version information (but I don't want to). I would need to extract the
version string from version.h, and there doesn't seem to be a portable
way to do this. I would like to preserve non-GNU make compatibility if
possible, as dmidecode works on BSD. The other possibility is to do it
the other way around, that is, store the version information in the
Makefile file and generate version.h from it. This at least can be done
in a portable way, but introduce dependencies I don't much like.

So, since anyway not everyone will like the way I decide to go, I might
as well choose the easiest way and not include the version in the
directory name.

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare