manwhich: Deriving MANPATH from PATH [PSARC/2007/688 FastTrack timeout 12/19/2007]

[Bart Blanquart]

>
>> Will the transformation rules be hardcoded  in the man.c
>> or will there be a system file which defines the transformation  
>> rules.
>> IOW - if sbin or exe is not included in the default transformation  
>> rules,
>> could a system administrator extend those rules?
>
> Currently they are hard-coded because I don't expect that these rules
> will need frequent updates.   However, I could see where ISV's may
> want to append on things like:
>
> /opt/VRTSvlic/bin /opt/VRTS/man
>
> If this route is taken, where should the config file go?  Should it
> have a syntax that allows future man configuration or be a simple
> two-column file with comments allowed?

The option to make the transformations configurable could be useful  
for other os.o distributions that have a different layout (changing a  
configuration file is easier to maintain than changing something in  
the source tree) and, come to think of it, might this not be useful  
for anyone delivering executables and manpages? If these  
transformations are configured correctly it removes the need for  
users to deal with MANPATH at all, though to keep things manageable  
some kind of wildcarding would be useful: e.g. if there's /opt/ 
<something>/bin in the PATH, add /opt/<something>/man to the  
corresponding MANPATH (except if a more specific, non-wildcarded rule  
applies).

Whatever syntax is chosen I would expect that it would get updated  
automatically by packages/the packaging system, so something easily  
updated programmatically (but, pending those packaging software to  
add this information to their packages admins would need to maintain  
this information so ideally it should be something readable too).

Bart