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.)
>
> Does this help?

Thanks, i've just opened a bug on the Gentoo bug tracker about 
this, "man pages for alternatives: Use of .so instead of symlink 
creates issue when using mandoc":

   https://bugs.gentoo.org/905624

in which i reference this thread.


Alexis.