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


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.

[...time passes...]

Hmm.  Interesting enough, the current /etc/man.conf already contains
/usr/ssl/man.  How long is it doing that already?  If I had known that,
I'd removed the /etc/profile.d/openssl.* files long ago :|


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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