Re: Does mandir get saved some place?

[Jim <linux.tech.guy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bart,

On Sun, Aug 6, 2017 at 6:02 AM, Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Jim <linux.tech.guy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > With the fact that the configure script has the option "mandir=<some
> dir>"
> > I assumed(bad thing to do) that there would be an easy way to discover
> > where the man pages were saved.
>
> Ah, well, the purpose of the configure option is so you can tell "make
> install" to put the manual pages in a place that's already in your
> $MANPATH.  It's not intended to change the shell to know about some
> new location.
>
> Understand.  Wasn't looking at it from that point of view.


> > would it be unreasonable to ask that a variable like "mandir" be set with
> > the path to those man pages?
>
> It wouldn't be unreasonable to ask, but I wouldn't promise an
> affirmative response.
>

In light of that, a rethink is in in order.  The one thing that still
bothers me
is that if you just use the defaults when building multiple versions the man
pages are overwritten. Without a rebuild there is currently no way, that I
can see, to get a specific version of the man pages back without a rebuild.
Reminds me of the saying, "If it hurts, don't do it".  But it does hurts
anyone
who is not aware of this. Not sure there is an easy answer.

Zsh is version "wise", so it doesn't seem unreasonable to have the man
pages do the same(like ${prefix}/share/zsh/{version}/man) It would take
the guesswork out of where the man pages are and make it easier to set
MANPATH when changing versions. This can be done with the --mandir
option and a few lines in .zshrc. The default man pages would be whatever
version of zsh your distribution has installed. But most distributions are
behind the current version, which started me down this rode in the first
place. :-(  As long as things are under my *own* control, this will work.

Thanks for responding and listening,

Jim