Does /etc/profile need to set MANPATH?

[Chris J. Breisch]

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.

I still need to verify that the problem I found with man-db and MANPATH 
is an upstream problem. I have an LFS system that I can use to test that 
and will do so later today.


-- 
Chris J. Breisch

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