Re: [Bug-ed] [PATCH] makefile: install man by default and use symlinks

[Mike Frysinger]

On Wednesday 31 December 2008 18:38:30 Karl Berry wrote:
>     install man by default
>
> I don't see a reason not to, although it's up to Antonio.

the normal behavior is to install man packages if they're available and let 
people sort out what they dont actually want on their system with `rm` or 
whatever.  otherwise you're forcing people who want to install "ed" to read 
the documentation rather than having `make install` simply work like every 
other package out there.

>     Use softlinks rather than hardlinks in the install steps.
>
> Why is that preferable?

much easier for package managers to track soft links rather than hard links.  
hard links means you need to do an inode compare on every single file, soft 
links are just another entry.

> What I see in the rules is that && should be used instead of ; for
> defensive purposes, as in
>
> < cd $(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/man1 ; ln ...
> --
>
> > cd $(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/man1 && ln ...

i dont see much point in the cd in the first place.  `ln` is fully capable of 
handling full paths.  but yes, you're right that using a semicolon is a bad 
idea.
-mike

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