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Message-ID: <53766CDA.7050501@breisch.org>
Date: Fri, 16 May 2014 15:54:02 -0400
From: "Chris J. Breisch" <chris.ml@breisch.org>
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To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: Does /etc/profile need to set MANPATH?
References: <53726A51.3010105@breisch.org> <20140513192457.GY2436@calimero.vinschen.de> <8738gc4810.fsf@Rainer.invalid> <20140515074942.GK2436@calimero.vinschen.de> <5374BCE5.7080609@breisch.org> <5374BE7D.70104@breisch.org> <20140515133939.GQ2436@calimero.vinschen.de>
In-Reply-To: <20140515133939.GQ2436@calimero.vinschen.de>
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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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