Bart Smaalders wrote:
> Darren J Moffat wrote:
> > This case proposes to introduce a set of enhancements for the default
> > shell environment in Solaris to provide a more user-friendly environment
> > for new users which are not yet familar with all the details in Unix and
> > to provide some help for adminstrators via introducing better system-wide
> > defaults and more configuration options.
> >
> > The proposed changes are:
> >
> > - Modifications to "/etc/profile" (and csh's "/etc/.login") to provide
> > beginner friendly defaults for the manual page-subsystem via the MANPATH
> > (set to a value calculated from PATH if MANPATH was not set yet, for
> > example if PATH is set to
> > "/opt/SUNWspro/bin:/usr/dt/bin:/usr/bin" the value for MANPATH should be
> > "/opt/SUNWspro/man:/usr/dt/man:/usr/man") and PAGER (set to
> > "/usr/bin/less"
> > if this binary is available and PAGER was not set yet, otherwise the
> > PAGER
> > variable will not be set) environment variables.
>
> Is this the desired behavior? Shouldn't man by default search through
> all man pages on the system?
Yes, this is intended to make sure the automagically calculated lookup
order for manual pages matches more or less the lookup order in the
${PATH} variable. If an adminstrator wishes to set his/her preferred
MANPATH value they can do that and the "automatic lookup" will
automagically disabled (e.g. if the variable is set no automagic look at
${PATH} will happen).
The "automagic lookup" is intended for the admins who set PATH in
/etc/default/login to something like
/opt/csw/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/SUNWspro/bin/:/usr/bin (this is just an
example) and don't set MANPATH to any value (which is AFAIK very common
for smaller sits unless the users have harassed the admins to fix
this... ;-( ). In this scenario the manual pages in /opt/csw/man,
/usr/local/man and /opt/SUNWspro/man are completely ignored and users
who are not familar with all the details of Solaris have to search or
ask around.
The second problem is that if /opt/csw/bin, /usr/local/bin and /usr/bin
have different versions or flavors of a tool called "foo" it would be
not very intuitive to get the manual page in /usr/man/man1/foo.1 when
the user gets the tool in /opt/csw/bin/foo first in his ${PATH} (yes, I
know... experienced users don't stumble over such issues... but newbies
do... ;-( ).
----
Bye,
Roland
--
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