[tex-live] experience report; suggestions

[George N. White III]

2009/8/28 Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>:
> 2009/8/28 Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>:
>>    RHEL5 and most recent Fedoras (AFAIK) do
>>    not use MANPATH or INFOPATH.
>>
>> I'll be depressed if that's really true, though it's certainly possible.
>> It would create a fundamental incompatibility with how Unix systems have
>> always been set up.
>>
> CentOS 5 is based upon RHEL5 and it does use MANPATH. This is the
> relevant part of "man man":

Ubuntu 9.04 has something similar.

Some applications rely on the MANPATH entires that are derived from the
search PATH.  This means you can adjust the PATH, e.g., between versions
N and N+1 of some application, and get the corresponding man pages.
For TeX Live
I have been creating a symbolic link to texmf/doc/man in the "bin"
directory so the "nearby" mechanism finds the appropriate tex man
pages.

> [...]
>       In addition, for each directory in the command search path
> (we'll call it a "command directory") for which you
>       do not have a MANPATH_MAP statement, man automatically looks
> for a manual page directory "nearby" namely as  a
>       subdirectory in the command directory itself or in the parent
> directory of the command directory.
>
>       You can disable the automatic "nearby" searches by including a
> NOAUTOPATH statement in /etc/man.config.
>
>       In  each directory in the search path as described above, man
> searches for a file named topic.section, with an
>       optional suffix on the section number and possibly a
> compression suffix.  If it doesn't find such a  file,  it
>       then looks in any subdirectories named manN or catN where N is
> the manual section number.  If the file is in a
>       catN subdirectory, man assumes it is a formatted manual page
> file (cat page).  Otherwise, man  assumes  it  is
>       unformatted.   In  either  case,  if the filename has a known
> compression suffix (like .gz), man assumes it is
>       gzipped.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia