PLEASE HELP - We need a policy for preventing man page name conflicts

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 22:47:45 -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:

> Many packages provide man3 (and other) man pages with generic names. 
> The case in question in ncarg-devel and allegro-devel which both provide 
> man3/line.3.gz.  So, what do we do?

Resolve the conflict. ;) Talk to both upstream developer groups. "line" is
a very generic name for a manual page in the API section if to be
installed in global search path.

> - package in /usr/share/<package>/man/?  If so, how to we update 
> MANPATH?  How does man handle finding both (all) of the man pages?

If you added the separate directory to default MANPATH, you would
end up with a conflict at search-time.

> - rename to something like <package>_<manpage>?  Do we always do this? 
> Only if a file conflicts?  Is there an easy way to find conflicts before 
> packaging?
> 
> - suffixes <manpage>.3<suffix> ?  Can man handle this?

AFAIK, while this can be used to avoid file conflicts ("man" can
handle an optional suffix after the section number), there is no
way for man to choose either one at the command-line unless you
specified the full file name.
Like "man /usr/share/man/man3/line.3allegro.gz". ;)

> Please help!