Re: [Groff] /usr/local/share/doc/groff-1.22.2

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Bernd,

Bernd Warken wrote on Tue, Oct 07, 2014 at 04:04:47PM +0200:

> The normal installation from git produces the directory
>   /usr/local/share/doc/groff-1.22.2
> 
> That is not optimal, without the version seems to be much
> better.

The idea probably is to allow sharing of /usr/local/share/ across
multiple machines, even if these machines run different operating
systems and different versions of groff.

In the old days, when 4.6 MB (the current size of
/usr/local/share/groff/1.22.2/ on my notebook, just as an example)
was an awful lot of space and buying so much disk space cost real
money, that was quite important.  Today, sharing /usr/local/share/
across machines is usually not a good idea because the additional
administration overhead is rarely worth the economy in disk space.

Whether that is a sufficient reason to drop version numbers from
directory names below /share/ is a matter of taste: There may still
be a few scattered people sharing /share/ in some highly unusual
situations.

I would tend to zap the version numbers nowadays.  It makes things
easier for at least 99.9% of all users and the tiny fraction still
doing such stunts have considerable administration overhead anyway
and certainly the required administative skills to define the proper
DIR variables needed in their custom installations, or they would
long have died from a thousand small cuts...

Yours,
  Ingo