dh_installman - install man pages into package build directories
dh_installman [
debhelper options]
[
manpage ...]
dh_installman is a debhelper program that handles installing man pages
into the correct locations in package build directories.
In compat 10 and earlier, this program was primarily for when upstream's build
system does not properly install them as a part of its install step (or it
does not have an install step). In compat 11 and later, it also supports the
default searchdir plus --sourcedir like
dh_install(1) and has the
advantage that it respects the nodoc build profile (unlike
dh_install(1)).
Even if you prefer to use
dh_install(1) for installing the manpages,
dh_installman can still be useful for converting the manpage encoding
to UTF-8 and for converting
.so links (as described below). However,
that part happens automatically without any explicit configuration.
You tell
dh_installman what man pages go in your packages, and it figures
out where to install them based on the section field in their
.TH or
.Dt line. If you have a properly formatted
.TH or
.Dt
line, your man page will be installed into the right directory, with the right
name (this includes proper handling of pages with a subsection, like
3perl, which are placed in
man3, and given an extension of
.3perl). If your
.TH or
.Dt line is incorrect or missing,
the program may guess wrong based on the file extension.
It also supports translated man pages, by looking for extensions like
.ll.8 and
.ll_LL.8, or by use of the
--language switch.
If
dh_installman seems to install a man page into the wrong section or
with the wrong extension, this is because the man page has the wrong section
listed in its
.TH or
.Dt line. Edit the man page and correct the
section, and
dh_installman will follow suit. See
man(7) for
details about the
.TH section, and
mdoc(7) for the
.Dt
section. If
dh_installman seems to install a man page into a directory
like
/usr/share/man/pl/man1/, that is because your program has a name
like
foo.pl, and
dh_installman assumes that means it is
translated into Polish. Use
--language=C to avoid this.
After the man page installation step,
dh_installman will check to see if
any of the man pages in the temporary directories of any of the packages it is
acting on contain
.so links. If so, it changes them to symlinks.
Also,
dh_installman will use man to guess the character encoding of each
manual page and convert it to UTF-8. If the guesswork fails for some reason,
you can override it using an encoding declaration. See
manconv(1) for
details.
From debhelper compatibility level 11 on,
dh_install will fall back to
looking in
debian/tmp for files, if it does not find them in the
current directory (or wherever you've told it to look using
--sourcedir).
- debian/package.manpages
- Lists man pages to be installed.
Supports substitution variables in compat 13 and later as documented in
debhelper(7).
-
-A, --all
- Install all files specified by command line parameters in
ALL packages acted on.
-
--language=ll
- Use this to specify that the man pages being acted on are
written in the specified language.
-
--sourcedir=dir
- Look in the specified directory for files to be installed.
This option requires compat 11 or later (it is silently ignored in compat
10 or earlier).
Note that this is not the same as the --sourcedirectory option used
by the dh_auto_* commands. You rarely need to use this
option, since dh_installman automatically looks for files in
debian/tmp in debhelper compatibility level 11 and above.
-
manpage ...
- Install these man pages into the first package acted on.
(Or in all packages if -A is specified).
An example
debian/manpages file could look like this:
doc/man/foo.1
# Translations
doc/man/foo.da.1
doc/man/foo.de.1
doc/man/foo.fr.1
# NB: The following line is considered a polish translation
# of "foo.1" (and not a manpage written in perl called "foo.pl")
doc/man/foo.pl.1
# ...
An older version of this program,
dh_installmanpages(1), is still used by
some packages, and so is still included in debhelper. It is, however,
deprecated, due to its counterintuitive and inconsistent interface. Use this
program instead.
debhelper(7)
This program is a part of debhelper.
Joey Hess <
[email protected]>