On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 12:03:05PM +0200, Rainer Orth wrote: > Stephen Hahn <sch at eng.sun.com> writes: > > > 2.4. Manual pages > > > > In the interest of reducing manual page scavenger hunts, this > > proposal recommends the introduction of a new manual page section, > > 1G, to cover the introduced utilities. (Sections 1MG, 3LIBG, and so > > forth can be added as necessary.) > > > > Management of the manual path then proceeds along similar lines as > > the executable path in Section 2.1: > > > > MANPATH=/usr/man,1g,1 > > > > to prefer the GNU project environment reference manual, and > > > > MANPATH=/usr/man,1,1g > > > > to use the GNU environment manual as a fallback. > > I strongly object to this part: using $prefix/man together with $prefix/bin > etc. a well-established and understood practice which many users are > already familiar with. Using this Solaris-specific way of dealing with the > issue will only introduce unnecessary confusion.
If we're to pack the man pages under /usr/gnu, then, I think it would be a requirement to augment the Solaris man utility to be configurable out-of-the-box to have multiple entries in MANPATH. There's a bug open against this -- 1146762 -- and is probably oss-bitesize-able, though I think it would require an ARC case. Failing that work, the documentation should be in a place that will be immediately available. One of the biggest problems we've found with /usr/sfw is that hardly anyone knows it exists or can find it. If man pages were available for utilities that specified their paths, those utilities would be findable (at least, so the theory goes). Danek
