Re: post-p2k11 resync

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Kristaps,

Kristaps Dzonsons wrote on Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 07:27:10PM +0100:
> On 26/11/2011 17:57, Ingo Schwarze wrote:

>> the OpenBSD part of the resync is done (well, there are still a few
>> minor patches outside the mandocsb/apropos area, i'll resend those
>> later).
>>
>> Here is the bsd.lv part, mostly removing trivial differences and
>> cleaning up whitespace.  But there are a few real issues:
>>
>>  * -M overrides MANPATH, not the other way round;
>>    -m _prepends_ to the path, it doesn't _append_.
>>    That was both implemented and documented the wrong way.
[...]

> Great---ok kristaps!

Thanks, done.

> As you can see, I tried to shove all of the
> MANPATH handling into manpath_parse(), which should set everything
> up from MANPATH, -m, -M, and man.conf/manpath(1)

Yes, i like that approach.

> (which, yes, is extremely ugly).

Sure, but maybe you are right that the portable version on
bsd.lv needs it; i didn't merge the #ifdef's to OpenBSD, though.
We are not getting manpath(1) anytime soon.  ;-)

[...]
> Incidentally, I still think there's a case for MANPATH acting like
> -m as mentioned before.  How else does one maintain a private manual
> tree? Using "-m" each time man(1) is invoked is ugly.

Well, i see your point there, though i'm not sure how important
it is.  If we think that we need this kind of functionality, we
might consider implementing the following approach found
in Linux manpath(1):

  MANPATH
    If $MANPATH is set,  manpath  displays  its  value  rather  than
    determining  it on the fly.  If $MANPATH is prefixed by a colon,
    then the value of the variable is appended to  the  list  deter-
    mined from the content of the configuration files.  If the colon
    comes at the end of the value in the variable, then  the  deter-
    mined  list  is appended to the content of the variable.  If the
    value of the variable contains a double  colon  (::),  then  the
    determined  list is inserted in the middle of the value, between
    the two colons.

But i'd at least recommend to wait some time until the dust has
settled, basic functionality is working and integrated and consider
fancy new features after that.

Until then, for people desperately needing this, a simple

  alias man='man -m "/my/very/private/manpath"'

might do the trick.

Yours,
  Ingo
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