Hi, thanks to sthen@ for providing more background!
so the bottom line seems to be that, once the code changes are tested, committed, and prove stable and once people come round to it, moving the site manual page directories out of /usr/local/man/ and making them versioned in exactly the same way as the sitelib directories may be a reasonable option. Even if the main effect of versioning them might be to make it more obvious for people what went wrong in case things get mixed up. Yours, Ingo