"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robin...@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.)
mgo...@gentoo.org has just pointed out that:
The problem with symlinks is that they need to be updated to
match manpage compression. `.so` works with any compression
used for the manpage.
-- https://bugs.gentoo.org/905624#c1
On Gentoo, man page compression is affected by user-specified
values for PORTAGE_COMPRESS and PORTAGE_COMPRESS_EXCLUDE_SUFFIXES;
PORTAGE_COMPRESS is set to 'bzip2' by default.
Alexis.
