Does /etc/profile need to set MANPATH?

Fri May 16 20:00:00 GMT 2014

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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