Re: [Nmh-workers] A --prefix friendly install

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Lyndon,

> My only concern is with where the manpages get installed.  Currently
> we put them under .../share/man/.  That seems to be the autoconf
> default location.  But for most of the systems I have access to,
> versions of man that adapt their search path based on $PATH search on
> ../man for every .../bin they find in $PATH.

Do you have access to any Debian-derived systems?  See manpath(5).  It
doesn't seem to have any simple s,bin,../man, AFAICS.

And then the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard says

    http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRSHAREMANMANUALPAGES

    The primary <mandir> of the system is /usr/share/man.
    /usr/share/man contains manual information for commands and data
    under the / and /usr filesystems.

    ...

    Manual pages for commands and data under /usr/local are stored in
    /usr/local/man.  Manual pages for X11R6 are stored in
    /usr/X11R6/man.

> So I'm wondering if it might not be better to install under
> $prefix/man rather than $prefix/share/man by default?  We might have
> to tune this in configure.ac, but I think installing in .../man will
> work for most OSes.

If $prefix is /usr then it's /usr/share/man.  Else it's $prefix/man.

Cheers, Ralph.