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man_make_section_directory should not be enabled by default #9217

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@foutrelis

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@foutrelis

Enabling man_make_section_directory by default in #8284 breaks projects relying on the previous behavior. This is a serious problem for Linux distributions that will end up with misplaced and unusable man pages. Please consider keeping it disabled by default; the benefit of being able to use MANPATH in the output directory does not justify this kind of breakage.

I also noticed that the current implementation generates paths like <builddir>/1 instead of <builddir>/man1. Only the latter can be used with MANPATH which appears to be the main motivation behind #7996.

Examples of breakage I've seen so far (and we've only had sphinx 4.0.x in Arch Linux for three days):

fish-shell does not expect the section subdirectory and results in man pages for built-in shell commands being installed to usr/share/fish/man/man1/1 instead of usr/share/fish/man/man1 and also fails to filter out fish.1, fish_indent.1 and fish_key_reader.1 which are meant to be installed to usr/share/man/man1.

llvm-project copies the output directory to usr/share/man/man1 resulting in paths like usr/share/man/man1/1/foo.1 (note the additional 1 directory).

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added a commit that references this issue on May 15, 2021

Fix sphinx-doc#9217: manpage: Dirname of man_make_section_directory i…

a6f9e5a
added this to the 4.0.2 milestone on May 15, 2021
modified the milestones: 4.0.2, 4.1.0 on May 16, 2021
tk0miya

tk0miya commented on May 16, 2021

@tk0miya
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Thank you for letting us know. I just reverted the change of default setting in #9232. It will be released as 4.0.2 soon. And I'll change the directory name in #9231. It will be released as 4.1.0.

added a commit that references this issue on May 17, 2021

Fix sphinx-doc#9217: manpage: Dirname of man_make_section_directory i…

79d9701
added a commit that references this issue on May 19, 2021

Merge pull request #9231 from tk0miya/9217_manpage_section_directory

567ff22
locked as resolved and limited conversation to collaborators on Jul 10, 2021
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          man_make_section_directory should not be enabled by default · Issue #9217 · sphinx-doc/sphinx