dh_installman - install man pages into package build directories
dh_installman [debhelper options] [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.
Any man page filenames specified as parameters will be installed into the first package dh_installman is told to act on. By default, this is the first binary package in debian/control, but if you use -p, -i, or -a flags, it will be the first package specified by those flags.
Files named debian/package.manpages can list other man pages to be installed.
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.
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.
This program is a part of debhelper.
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>