I know this only handles man section 1 but
MANPATH vs. PATH and option consistency with documentation are
the main points that won over space when we decided to make --man
an option to all ast commands and ksh scripts that use getopts(1)
(l10n and long option names also factored in, along with getting me
to document my commands)
I'm not proposing this, but an ast-ish solution to this would be to recode
man(1) to check MANPATH first if it exists (or to drop MANPATH altogether)
and have man look in
../man
for each dir in PATH, and require that man dirs be installed as siblings
to the bin dirs to which they refer
when applied to other utilities it has the wonderful effect of eliminating
almost all PATH-like env vars save PATH itself
-- Glenn Fowler -- AT&T Research, Florham Park NJ --
On Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:14:47 +0200 Roland Mainz wrote:
> 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).
