On Sat, 23 Nov 2002 18:35:19 -0600, "Vox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>said:
>
>This time "Matthew O. Persico" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>becomes daring and writes:
>
>> Well, not that bad, but is sounded catchy.
>>
>> Using Mandrake 8.2 (even though I sprung for the 9.0 disks and my
>> credit card was charged in September and I STILL don't have the disks
>> :-( ), I set
>>
>> MANPATH=/opt/perl/lib/perl5/man:/usr/lib/perl5/man
>>
>> Apparently, unlike Solaris and any other *NIX system I have used,
>> MANPATH is not additive - it REPLACES all other heuristics for
>> locating manpages. Hence, I gained manpages for Perl and lost every
>> other manpage in the system.
>>
>> So, I unset MANPATH and did man man and it said to check out
>> /usr/etc/man.config and man man.conf(5). Well, neither the file nor
>> the manpage exist on my system.
>>
>> How does one ADD man paths to the lookup heuristics?
>
>  MANPATH = $MANPATH:/new/dir/goes/here:/another/new/dir
>
This does not work. A default Mandrake install does not initialize MANPATH at all. By 
setting MANPATH, I override all the settings in /etc/man.config. Yes, it's weird. No, 
I've not seen this in any *NIX system I've ever worked on. But there it is.

Now, I could, someplace in /etc/profile.d/foobar.sh do this:

MANPATH=$(manpath)

to initialize the variable, but then I defeat all the default setups that will 
automatically find, for example, /opt/foo/man without having to add it manually. Since 
I was doing this primarily to get man for Perl pages to work (they're out there, but 
not enabled by default) even when I swap Perl versions, I'm just going to punt and use 
perldoc exclusively.


--
Matthew O. Persico



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