[OS X TeX] MacTeX installer and man pages

[Chris Goedde]

On Jul 21, 2006, at 11:59 AM, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:

> On Jul 21, 2006, at 11:50 AM, Justin C. Walker wrote:
>> Just a followup (should have said it explicitly in my previous  
>> response): I would consider modifying 'man.conf' (at least on  
>> later versions of Mac OS X), rather than relying on MANPATH; I use  
>> the latter only for testing and quick checks.  The former is the  
>> preferred means to configure the 'man' command.
>>
> Can you elaborate on that a bit? I am far from a Unix expert, but  
> it was my understanding that it's situations like this that  
> environment variables are good for. It just seems to me weird that  
> after using the path in MANPATH and not finding any matches, man  
> wouldn't go on to try the method specified by man.conf.
> I am just curious what the reason, if any, behind it is, if anyone  
> knows.

Setting an environment variable in .bash_profile (or equivalent) is  
relatively fragile compared to editing a configuration file because  
of the rules about when such files are (or are not) loaded, what  
happens if you change shells, etc. Also, you shouldn't ever have to  
set pointers to system-wide resources in a per-user file, IMO.

In any case, I was able to fix the problem without setting a MANPATH  
or changing man.conf just by moving the man pages to the right  
location (from /usr/local/man to /usr/local/share/man).

-- 
Chris

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