Long, long ago, LFS used to explicitly install man-pages very early in the final system, so that pages from the installed packages would not be overwritten. My understanding is that the kernel and library pages from man-pages should be up-to-date, but others are for things that used to only have info pages, or are posix pages (0p etc) which no package overwrites.
Looking to see what man-pages had installed, I recognised a few commands, and checked against my log from coreutils. Grep and diff tell me that the following pages were overwritten:
@@ -1,86 +1,199 @@
/usr/share/man/man1/chgrp.1
/usr/share/man/man1/chmod.1
/usr/share/man/man1/chown.1
/usr/share/man/man1/cp.1
/usr/share/man/man1/dd.1
/usr/share/man/man1/df.1
/usr/share/man/man1/dir.1
/usr/share/man/man1/dircolors.1
/usr/share/man/man1/du.1
/usr/share/man/man1/install.1
/usr/share/man/man1/ln.1
/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1
/usr/share/man/man1/mkdir.1
/usr/share/man/man1/mkfifo.1
/usr/share/man/man1/mknod.1
/usr/share/man/man1/mv.1
/usr/share/man/man1/rm.1
/usr/share/man/man1/rmdir.1
/usr/share/man/man1/touch.1
/usr/share/man/man1/vdir.1
Looking at only the first of these, I see that coreutils supplies an accurate page dated May 2006, but it has been overwritten by an old page derived from fileutils-4.0 and dated 2000-08.
Possibly, other packages are also affected.
The only dependency in the 'install' target for man-pages is 'install'.
There are no manual pages in glibc and the pages installed by gcc and binutils are not supplied in man-pages.
I propose that either we install man-pages at the beginning of the final system, or failing that as soon as the final toolchain is in place (after linux-headers, or after binutils). I guess that installing after binutils will not detract from the importance of the method used to build the toolchain, so it may be preferable.
