[BUG] 2 of 3 man page configuration options unsupported

[Zordrak]

What / Why

Firstly please forgive any assertions I make that are completely wrong - I'm doing my best to understand something that is completely alien to me.

https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/configuring-npm/package-json states 3 ways to add a man page in a package.json:

• directories.man: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/configuring-npm/package-json#directoriesman
• man String: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/configuring-npm/package-json#man
• man Array: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/configuring-npm/package-json#man

I do not know whether the intention is for directories.man to be supported by bin-links or as a process managed by npm or Arborist that would interrogate the directory and convert its contents into a man Array property before sending it to bin-links.

Giving the benefit of the doubt that it is the latter - I would expect per the documentation for bin-links to support either a String or an Array for a man property, however it currently only supports an Array:

bin-links/lib/get-paths.js

Line 27 in 47e3e53

if (manTarg && pkg.man && Array.isArray(pkg.man) && pkg.man.length) {

I do not know the progeny of this toolset and what begat what so as to know if this is a feature request for string support, or a bug request that expected string support is missing - but it seems to be missing either way.

References

• Related to [BUG] Man pages are deleted, but not reinstalled cli#2914
• Related to https://github.com/npm/arborist/issues/312

[wraithgar]

The normalization of the package.json entry is done during parsing by read-package-json by way of npm-normalize-package-bin