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

[George N. White III]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Werner LEMBERG <wl at gnu.org> wrote:
>
> I just tried
>
>  texdoc mptopdf
>
> and I get a
>
>  Sorry, I'm not smart enough to find documentation for mptopdf.
>  Please see http://tug.org/pkginfo/mptopdf for information about the
>  package.
>
> I suggest that texdoc looks into the man page directories too, calling
> `man'.

This won't work on Windows, so for TL the best aproach is to make
man pages into .pdf at build time so texdoc will work alike for all the
supported systems.   There is nothing to prevent a local admin from
configuring texdoc to use man for .1 pages.

There isn't any portable way to make TL's man files available to
the system 'man' command (e.g., outside texdoc).  Some (older)
systems use MANPATH, but new systems may have /etc/man.conf(ig),
and may not set MANPATH at all.   If you then set MANPATH to
TL's man directory, some versions of man won't find system man
pages (which may be a good thing when man is run under texdoc).
Some versions of man will look for 'man' directories adjacent to
the 'bin' directory, and some will even map bin/<arch>/command to
man/man1/command.1.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia