manpath

[Shawn Protsman]

On Oct 27, 2008, at 6:27 PM, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> On 2008-10-27 20:01:48 -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> Apple sets the MANPATH to "/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/
>> X11/man" on Leopard for you. So at least Apple doesn't think it  
>> should
>> end with a colon.
>
> Apple often does things wrong. Try (while having /opt/local/bin in
> $PATH):
>
> MANPATH="/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11/man" man port
>
> MANPATH="/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11/man:" man port
>
> Normally the first one should fail and the second should work.
>
> MANPATH should probably be unset anyway.
>
>> The MacPorts installer does add the MacPorts path to the MANPATH  
>> for you
>> in your .profile if MANPATH is not empty and does not already  
>> contain the
>> MacPorts manpath. Are you saying the MacPorts installer shouldn't do
>> that?
>
> A (non-empty) MANPATH containing an empty path (i.e. a colon at the
> beginning or at the end, or a "::" sequence) and not containing the
> MacPorts manpath is correct, because the empty path will be replaced
> by the default paths, that will normally be built using $PATH. The
> user may have set up such a MANPATH, and if you modify it, this can
> be wrong as you will change the path order.

Okay, so now I'm thoroughly confused. OS X (10.5.5) reported nothing  
when I did an 'echo $MANPATH' and wouldn't show me a man page for  
'port'. So, I added 'export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH' to  
my .profile and now at least I can view manpages from macports. Is  
there a proper way to pull this off? Macports 1.6.0 either didn't  
modify something it should have or it is up to the user to add a  
MANPATH. If there are system inconsistencies that might happen then  
that is bad too.

--Shawn