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Re: Does /etc/profile need to set MANPATH?


Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On May 15 09:17, Chris J. Breisch wrote:
Chris J. Breisch wrote:
Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On May 14 18:52, Achim Gratz wrote:
Corinna Vinschen writes:
Yes, this might be better discussed in cygwin-apps. I guess the setting
of MANPATH is mainly historical.
I'd be happy to not set MANPATH in /etc/profile if we no longer need it
for the standard installation.
I'm wondering if setting MANPATH was really ever required for the old
man either. In a tcsh environment, MANPATH is not set by default.
If you install the openssl package, MANPATH is set like this (in
/etc/profile.d/openssh.csh):

if ( ! $?MANPATH ) setenv MANPATH ""
setenv MANPATH "${MANPATH}:/usr/ssl/man"

which results in:

$ echo $MANPATH
:/usr/ssl/man

I have neither problems to see the man pages in the default paths nor
problems to see the openssl man pages.
Well, /etc/profile and /etc/profile.d/openssh.sh add a few more folders
to MANPATH in bash. If your man pages are working, then we probably
don't need MANPATH.

I'm guessing though that if you unset MANPATH, you can't see the man
pages in /usr/ssl/man. The new man from man-db doesn't find them either,
however.

But I think the proper solution to that is to add the appropriate lines
to man_db.conf rather than to force something into MANPATH. OTOH, we
already have the openssh.[c]sh files working, so maybe it's easier to
continue with that, rather than modifying the OpenSSL package to update
man_db.conf.

Or I could just add the values to man_db.conf, regardless of whether OpenSSL
is installed. It's not going to hurt anything to have them there.

You still have to be able to handle MANPATH.  Unfortunately the man page
of man-db is a little tight-lipped on how MANPATH is handled exactly,
other than that "its value is used as the path to search  for manual
pages."

Whatever man does with MANPATH, it doesn't drop the default man paths,
apparently.


It's not that man-db doesn't handle MANPATH, it's that it gives too much power to it, I think.

MANPATH always overrides whatever is in man_db.conf, even if you specify an override conf file on the command line with man -C <conf file>.

I have verified that this happens in my LFS system. So, either I don't understand how this is supposed to work, or this is an upstream problem.

I'll send something to the man-db group about it this weekend, and hopefully work some more on getting this packaged up as well.


--
Chris J. Breisch

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