[Distutils] man pages (& gzip & bdist_rpm on SuSE, oh my!)

[Charles Duffy]

I'm trying to use bdist_rpm to build RPMs for a number of 3rd-party 
packages on SuSE SLES9. Among the issues I've run into:

SuSE has a different %mandir from Red Hat -- man pages go under 
/usr/share/man rather than /usr/man. Upstream setup.py specifies 
data_files=[('man/man1', ['bzr.1'])]. I can change this to reference 
'share/man/man1', which lets me build my package -- but it'd be nice to 
have something I can distribute upstream. Do I need to actually look at 
the filesystem and determine whether /usr/share/man exists and pass in 
the appropriate path, or is there a better approach?

In /usr/lib/rpm/suse-macros, an __os_install_post macro is specified 
which calls %{suse_check} and then /usr/lib/rpm/brp-compress. Either of 
these will compress man pages (among other files), should it find them. 
This leads to the issue described in 
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2001-December/002674.html. 
Other than temporarily modifying /usr/lib/rpm/suse-macros, are there any 
ready workarounds?

Thanks!