dh_installman(1)

NAME

dh_installman - install man pages into package build directories

dh_installman [debhelperoptions] [manpage...]

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

what man pages go in your packages, and it figures out where to install them based on the section field in their .TH line. If you have a

properly formatted .TH 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 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 line. Edit the man page and correct the

section, and dh_installman will follow suit. See man(7) for details about the .TH 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.

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

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.

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>