On May 13 14:54, Chris J. Breisch wrote: > I've been working on getting man-db in a state where I can submit a package > for it. I had been baffled by the failure of one of the tests that was > dealing with overriding the man_db.conf file, so had been struggling to get > a version that passes everything before I submitted it. > > I finally discovered that the root cause was that MANPATH was being set from > /etc/profile and that this value was conflicting with the test and causing > it to fail. Unsetting MANPATH allowed the test to succeed[1]. > > My question is then, is it necessary to set this value? Is it something > required by the current version of man that we're using? If so, man-db seems > to override this necessity as it makes considerable effort to work out a > reasonable manpath on it's own. > > Perhaps this discussion belongs in cygwin-apps. I'll be happy to take it > elsewhere.
Yes, this might be better discussed in cygwin-apps. I guess the setting of MANPATH is mainly historical. > ----------- > [1] The failure of this test also seems to me to indicate an upstream bug. > If MANPATH is set, man-db always ignores the data in the man_db.conf file, > even if the conf file is specified on the command line. Worse, man-db > actually reads the conf file, but then ignores the data. Perhaps this is > working as designed, but if so, the design seems flawed from my perspective. > From my research, this does not appear to be a Cygwin specific issue, > although I haven't yet tried to reproduce it on a Linux system. Be careful when this works differently on Linux. The distro you're testing this on might have additional patches applied, too... I would suggest to discuss this upstream. Corinna -- Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to Cygwin Maintainer cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Red Hat
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