On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:29:31PM +0200, Rainer Orth wrote: > Stephen Hahn <sch at eng.sun.com> writes: > > > MANPATH=/usr/man,1gnu,1 > > Although I've raised this before, I'd like to do so again: what is the > advantage of using this Solaris-specific way of handling this preference > selection, compared to the perfectly well-established and -understood way > of having several directories in MANPATH?
I just noticed that Stephen did something weird with his definitions of MANPATH above. That's not valid MANPATH syntax on Solaris any more than it is anywhere else. I think he meant "MANSECTS", as in /usr/share/man/man.cf, but without the path. Thus the default MANPATH would stay "/usr/share/man", but /usr/share/man/man.cf would ship with "1gnu" immediately following "1" (or possibly following "1m"?). > I understand that we need a way to set a system-wide default for MANPATH to > handle this, but so do we for PATH as well. If we can use /etc/profile > etc. for this, I don't see why it would be necessary to use a MANPATH > syntax differing from the common PATH one. This is something that came up in a previous attempt to "fix" the /usr/sfw problem, PSARC 2004/066 "append /usr/sfw to the default path". The problem basically was that many people set their PATHs manually and no amount of setting PATH in all the right places would make new path elements show up if their .profile/.<something>shrc didn't allow for it. The case was withdrawn in a flurry of other problems as well. But that one issue has prevented any case since from proposing modifying default environment variables. Perhaps that needs to be revisited in light of this, though I can think of some mechanisms that would avoid hitting that issue head-on. Danek
