dh_installman

DH_INSTALLMAN(1)                   Debhelper                  DH_INSTALLMAN(1)

NAME
       dh_installman - install man pages into package build directories

SYNOPSIS
       dh_installman [debhelperoptions] [manpage...]

DESCRIPTION
       dh_installman is a debhelper program that handles installing man pages
       into the correct locations in package build directories.

       In compat 10 and earlier, this program was primarily for when
       upstream's build system does not properly install them as a part of its
       install step (or it does not have an install step).  In compat 11 and
       later, it also supports the default searchdir plus --sourcedir like
       dh_install(1) and has the advantage that it respects the nodoc build
       profile (unlike dh_install(1)).

       Even if you prefer to use dh_install(1) for installing the manpages,
       dh_installman can still be useful for converting the manpage encoding
       to UTF-8 and for converting .so links (as described below).  However,
       that part happens automatically without any explicit configuration.

       You tell dh_installman what man pages go in your packages, and it
       figures out where to install them based on the section field in their
       .TH or .Dt line. If you have a properly formatted .TH or .Dt line, your
       man page will be installed into the right directory, with the right
       name (this includes proper handling of pages with a subsection, like
       3perl, which are placed in man3, and given an extension of .3perl). If
       your .TH or .Dt line is incorrect or missing, the program may guess
       wrong based on the file extension.

       It also supports translated man pages, by looking for extensions like
       .ll.8 and .ll_LL.8, or by use of the --language switch.

       If dh_installman seems to install a man page into the wrong section or
       with the wrong extension, this is because the man page has the wrong
       section listed in its .TH or .Dt line. Edit the man page and correct
       the section, and dh_installman will follow suit. See man(7) for details
       about the .TH section, and mdoc(7) for the .Dt section. If
       dh_installman seems to install a man page into a directory like
       /usr/share/man/pl/man1/, that is because your program has a name like
       foo.pl, and dh_installman assumes that means it is translated into
       Polish. Use --language=C to avoid this.

       After the man page installation step, dh_installman will check to see
       if any of the man pages in the temporary directories of any of the
       packages it is acting on contain .so links. If so, it changes them to
       symlinks.

       Also, dh_installman will use man to guess the character encoding of
       each manual page and convert it to UTF-8. If the guesswork fails for
       some reason, you can override it using an encoding declaration. See
       manconv(1) for details.

       From debhelper compatibility level 11 on, dh_install will fall back to
       looking in debian/tmp for files, if it does not find them in the
       current directory (or wherever you've told it to look using
       --sourcedir).

FILES
       debian/package.manpages
           Lists man pages to be installed.

           Supports substitution variables in compat 13 and later as
           documented in debhelper(7).

OPTIONS
       -A, --all
           Install all files specified by command line parameters in ALL
           packages acted on.

       --language=ll
           Use this to specify that the man pages being acted on are written
           in the specified language.

       --sourcedir=dir
           Look in the specified directory for files to be installed.  This
           option requires compat 11 or later (it is silently ignored in
           compat 10 or earlier).

           Note that this is not the same as the --sourcedirectory option used
           by the dh_auto_* commands. You rarely need to use this option,
           since dh_installman automatically looks for files in debian/tmp in
           debhelper compatibility level 11 and above.

       manpage ...
           Install these man pages into the first package acted on. (Or in all
           packages if -A is specified).

EXAMPLES
       An example debian/manpages file could look like this:

         doc/man/foo.1
         # Translations
         doc/man/foo.da.1
         doc/man/foo.de.1
         doc/man/foo.fr.1
         # NB: The following line is considered a polish translation
         # of "foo.1" (and not a manpage written in perl called "foo.pl")
         doc/man/foo.pl.1
         # ...

NOTES
       An older version of this program, dh_installmanpages(1), is still used
       by some packages, and so is still included in debhelper.  It is,
       however, deprecated, due to its counterintuitive and inconsistent
       interface. Use this program instead.

SEE ALSO
       debhelper(7)

       This program is a part of debhelper.

AUTHOR
       Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>

12.10ubuntu1                      2020-03-27                  DH_INSTALLMAN(1)