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

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On May 13 14:54, Chris J. Breisch wrote:
> I've been working on getting man-db in a state where I can submit a package
> for it. I had been baffled by the failure of one of the tests that was
> dealing with overriding the man_db.conf file, so had been struggling to get
> a version that passes everything before I submitted it.
> 
> I finally discovered that the root cause was that MANPATH was being set from
> /etc/profile and that this value was conflicting with the test and causing
> it to fail. Unsetting MANPATH allowed the test to succeed[1].
> 
> My question is then, is it necessary to set this value? Is it something
> required by the current version of man that we're using? If so, man-db seems
> to override this necessity as it makes considerable effort to work out a
> reasonable manpath on it's own.
> 
> Perhaps this discussion belongs in cygwin-apps. I'll be happy to take it
> elsewhere.

Yes, this might be better discussed in cygwin-apps.  I guess the setting
of MANPATH is mainly historical.

> -----------
> [1] The failure of this test also seems to me to indicate an upstream bug.
> If MANPATH is set, man-db always ignores the data in the man_db.conf file,
> even if the conf file is specified on the command line. Worse, man-db
> actually reads the conf file, but then ignores the data. Perhaps this is
> working as designed, but if so, the design seems flawed from my perspective.
> From my research, this does not appear to be a Cygwin specific issue,
> although I haven't yet tried to reproduce it on a Linux system.

Be careful when this works differently on Linux.  The distro you're
testing this on might have additional patches applied, too...
I would suggest to discuss this upstream.


Corinna

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

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