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

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 1:14 PM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr> wrote:
> Mojca Miklavec scripsit (15.07.2008 07:58)
>> 1.) When installing ConTeXt scheme, these man pages do not get
>> included, but they should. (read as: if I install mptopdf binary, I
>> don't get its man page)
>>
> Hmm, those man pages are part of bin-context.  The script themselves are part
> of bin-context.ARCH.  This looks fine to me.  I also have the man page on my
> local install (I mean, not running from the svn) and it is found by man (I
> have MANPATH set).  Could you try updating and come back with more details?

Mea culpa. I was looking into texmf-dist, while the files are placed in texmf.

>> 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.
>>
> Dunno. Would be a good idea since people would only have to set PATH.  Form
> man man, I suppose (didn't try) we could just put things like this:
>
> TLROOT/bin (in the PATH)
> TLROOT/man (found?)

It says: if man resides in parent dir. This would be two parent dirs
apart, so I would expect problems, but maybe I'm wrong.

Generally it works, but there is bin/platform/binary, and it would
expect bin/man/binary.1 as far as I understooi. If it was the other
way round - platform/bin/binary, it would expect
platform/man/binary.1. (worse idea)

> which would be cleaner than putting man in bin :-)  The problem is, there's
> still no symlinks on windows...  And we don't want to really put man pages
> here, at least atm, since it would be quite a big change for our update
> machanisms.  Anyway this doens't solve the texdoc question.

I was talking about "man mptopdf" all the time, not about "texdoc
mptopdf". But if you are referring to windows, I would suggest storing
auto-generated html or pdf files somewhere. And I see no reason why
these html/pdf files could not be opened on linux/mac/whatever as well
(optional). Those who strictly want man pages, can still use man.
Those who expect html or pdf, can get a html page with the same
content as man, even on windows.

I see no harm in shipping a bunch of additional html files with
autogenerated contents from man.

But I agree with Manuel's doubts in his latest post.

Mojca