[tex-live] texdoc doesn't find man pages

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 10:05:34AM +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 9:44 AM, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> >
> >> 2.) Why not copying those man pages parallel to bin folder (to
> >> texlive/2008/bin/man)? Then they would be found by man
> >> automatically.  I don't know the exact algorithm of man page
> >> searching, but we have
> >>     texmf-bin/bin/mptopdf
> >>     texmf-bin/man/mptopdf.1
> >> and that works. I guess that it would also work with the proposal
> >> above, though I didn't test.
> >
> > IMHO it's a bad idea to clutter a `bin' directory with non-bin stuff.
> 
> But on the other hand the easiest solution that works out of the box.

A clean implementation shouldn't be that difficult, e.g.
the program `man' checks the environment variable MANPATH.
texdoc has access to texmf.cnf and knows how to find the various
TDS trees with their man directories. Then it sets MANPATH for the
call of man. I don't think that texdoc should be able to display
*all* manual pages of the system.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>