Does /etc/profile need to set MANPATH?

[Chris J. Breisch]

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.

> 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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