Does /etc/profile need to set MANPATH?

[Larry Hall (Cygwin)]

On 05/15/2014 09:39 AM, 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.
>
> [...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 :|

I'm not sure exactly but a quick look in the Cygwin email archives shows
a reference from 2005 with it.  We were very forward-thinking back then. ;-)

-- 
Larry

_____________________________________________________________________

A: Yes.
 > Q: Are you sure?
 >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
 >>> Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?

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