manpath change for ports ?

[Koop Mast]

On Tue, 2017-03-07 at 00:56 +0100, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I would like to propose a change in the localbase hier for ports
> 
> I think we should add /usr/local/share/man in the manpath along with
> at first
> and maybe instead of in long term.
> 
> The reason is:
> - /usr/local/share/man seems more consistent to me with base which
> have:
>   /usr/share/man
> - It will remove lots of patches from the ports tree where were we
> need to patch
>   upstream build system to install in a non usual path.
> 
> My proposal is to add to the manpath /usr/local/share/man in default
> man(1)
> command in FreeBSD 12 (MFCed to 11-STABLE)
> 
> and either provide an errata for 11.0/10.3 or a
> /usr/local/etc/man.d/something.conf via a port or something like that
> for those
> two, what do you think?
> 
> For the same reason I would like to allow porters to stop patching
> (with pathfix
> or anything else) the path for pkgconfig files and allow
> /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig along with the current
> /usr/local/libdata/pkgconfig:/usr/libdata/pkgconfig
> 
> Which will also remove tons of hacks from the ports tree.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Best regards,
> Bapt

Hello,

I recently committed the USES for the meson build system to ports. This
USES configures the meson build system with some default variables
which includes the location of the man pages. This setting is just a
flag to the meson command so it easy to change.

Meson also handles the generation and installation of pkg-config files
that a port wants. The problem is that this is handled by the script
itself and there is no way to configure it, so we need to hack the
meson port to change it from lib/pkg-config to libdata/pkg-config like
we currently are using. (1) Or add a hack to meson.mk to move the pkg-
config to the right location (evil++ imho).

My point I want to make is that currently there is only 1 port build
via the meson system (graphics/graphene). Should we change man/pkg-
config file locations now, it very easy. If we want to change them
later we will need to mass bump every meson build port. It is important
to note that GStreamer and GNOME are moving over to using meson instead
of autotools and that Wayland, Xorg en Mesa are exploring want is
needed to make the switch. So I think it important that the decision
what to do is done now and that we stick with it.

Reading the rest of the thread it seems nobody is really against the
proposed change of man and pkg-config path's. So how does one submit a
policy change like this? I'm also not sure I'm the right person to push
this, I just got back from a break and I don't want to really deal with
something super high profile right away.

-Koop

(1) I would like to see lib/pkg-config back in the search path of
pkgconf since that means I don't have to do a crash course python
programming.