manpath

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 28, 2008, at 02:28, Erwan David wrote:

>> 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.
>
> man man should show you this page
> http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/ 
> man1/man.1.html
>
> So, check /private/etc/man.conf and check that you have no MANPATH
> variable.

On Mac OS X 10.4 (and earlier), Apple provides no /private/etc/man.conf.

On Mac OS X 10.5 (and later?), Apple does provide /private/etc/ 
man.conf and it does set MANPATH. It's not really MacPorts' place to  
modify Apple-provided files so we have to work with that file as it is.