Stephen Hahn <sch at eng.sun.com> writes:
> 2.5. Manual pages
>
> In the interest of reducing manual page scavenger hunts, this
> proposal recommends the introduction of a new manual page section,
> | to be represented in manual page text as "1GNU", to cover the
> | introduced utilities. (Sections 1MGNU, 3GNU, and so forth can be
> | added as necessary.)
>
> Management of the manual path then proceeds along similar lines as
> the executable path in Section 2.1:
>
> MANPATH=/usr/man,1gnu,1
>
> to prefer the GNU project environment reference manual, and
>
> MANPATH=/usr/man,1,1gnu
>
> | to use the GNU environment manual as a fallback (for searches of the
> | entire manual page collection). If additional manual page sections
> | are required, they should also be named with a "GNU" suffix and the
> | section directory extended with a "gnu" suffix.
>
> | In the standard configuration, the 1GNU section will follow the
> | default 1 section in the default search order.
Although I've raised this before, I'd like to do so again: what is the
advantage of using this Solaris-specific way of handling this preference
selection, compared to the perfectly well-established and -understood way
of having several directories in MANPATH?
Consider the four different environments I suggested in another message
(I'm /usr/man and /usr/gnu/man here for brevity, although those should be
/usr/share/man and /usr/gnu/share/man):
* Solaris-only:
PATH=/usr/bin
MANPATH=/usr/bin MANPATH=/usr/man,1
* prefer Solaris with GNU additions:
PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/gnu/bin
MANPATH=/usr/man:/usr/gnu/man MANPATH=/usr/man,1,1gnu
* prefer GNU
PATH=/usr/gnu/bin:/usr/bin
MANPATH=/usr/gnu/man:/usr/man MANPATH=/usr/man,1gnu,1
* GNU-only
PATH=/usr/gnu/bin
MANPATH=/usr/gnu/man MANPATH=/usr/man,1gnu
The classic solution works cross-platform and is well understood by many
users, the 1GNU etc. section proposal is requires Solaris-specific
knowledge. This might be acceptable, but becomes problematic if one takes
into consideration that GNU software has not only section 1 manpages, but
other sections as well. If you want (or need) to handle preferences (or
exclusion) for those with the ,<section> syntax as well, this quickly
becomes unwieldly.
I understand that we need a way to set a system-wide default for MANPATH to
handle this, but so do we for PATH as well. If we can use /etc/profile
etc. for this, I don't see why it would be necessary to use a MANPATH
syntax differing from the common PATH one.
Rainer
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Rainer Orth, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University
