TL;DR: I propose move man pages out of a multi-arch: same package into a arch all package. Asking for any downsides and usrmerge review.
I'm in the process of packaging pam 1.7.0. Upstream has moved from autotools to meson and in the process has streamlined their release tarballs to remove all or almost all build artifacts such as generated man pages. Today, we include man pages for all the pam modules in libpam-modules. Libpam-modules is multi-arch: Same, so all these man pages need to be bit-for-bit identical across all architectures. Originally that was easy: we just included unmodified upstream man pages. But various Debian patches change the man pages. For a while we just built the man pages but if any of the docbook tools changed between one arch build and another, we'd end up with m-a uninstallable packages. So, we ended up including patches to the man pages as well as their source. This was a real pain to maintain under the old build system, but it's even more annoying now. My proposal is to move the man pages into libpam-doc. I'm not actually convinced that normal Debian users need man pages for all the pam modules on all Debian systems, and a suggests relationship should be sufficient. If people really want to maintain the current level of man page presence, we could move the manpages into libpam-modules-bin which is M-A: foreign. I think there are no usrmerge implications. While libpam-modules did move files from /lib/multiarch_tripple/security to /usr/lib/multiarch_tripple/security, the man pages have always been in /usr/share/man, which lives on /usr. Thoughts on this proposed action?
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