On Sat, 4 Jan 2025 12:15:55 +0100 Bill Allombert <ballo...@debian.org> wrote: > On Sat, Jan 04, 2025 at 10:28:55AM +0000, Sean Whitton wrote: > > > But for /usr/share/man and /usr/share/info, what to do ? > > > > Well, patch the program not to require the files. I'm not sure there's > > any very general advice we could give about doing that. > > Well, then maybe this is premature to require it if we do not know how to > implement it.
"patch the program not to require the files" is how to implement it; the details will depend on the package and why it's requiring the files. The most common reason for a piece of software to "require" a file under /usr/share/man is that it implements `--help` or similar by running `man theprogram`. In general, that will tend to fail gracefully, and probably pass through the error message from `man` (e.g. "No manual entry for theprogram"). One less-graceful failure mode I've seen, a *very* long time ago in some old GUI software, is that you pick a "help" or "manual" option in the menu, and it seems to do nothing at all. If you happen to have run the software from a terminal, you might see a log message about not finding the file, but nothing shows up in the GUI. I haven't seen any software do that in a very long time, but if there was still a program with that failure mode, the obvious fix would be to either display an error dialogue with the error message or to disable the menu option if the manpage isn't found.
