Re: Behaviour of .so differs between mandoc and groff

[Alexis]

"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:

> In practice, as I understand it, `so` doesn't achieve anything 
> for man
> pages that can't be done with symbolic links and (importantly) a 
> man
> page indexer that is symlink-aware.  Perhaps `so` support was 
> preserved,
> and its practice retained, for a long time because at one point 
> in the
> 1980s I think there was an AT&T/BSD split over symbolic links 
> even being
> supported by the kernel.  (And, to be fair, symbolic links are 
> something
> of a hack that can make file system operations more painful.  I 
> see from
> the nftw() man page that they were still doing so as late as 
> glibc 2.30,
> 3 years ago.)

mgorny@gentoo.org has just pointed out that:

> The problem with symlinks is that they need to be updated to 
> match manpage compression.  `.so` works with any compression 
> used for the manpage.

-- https://bugs.gentoo.org/905624#c1

On Gentoo, man page compression is affected by user-specified 
values for PORTAGE_COMPRESS and PORTAGE_COMPRESS_EXCLUDE_SUFFIXES; 
PORTAGE_COMPRESS is set to 'bzip2' by default.


Alexis.