[tex-live] experience report; suggestions

[John Collins]

Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 2009/8/28 Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>:
>>    RHEL5 and most recent Fedoras (AFAIK) do
>>    not use MANPATH or INFOPATH.
>>
>> I'll be depressed if that's really true, though it's certainly possible.
>> It would create a fundamental incompatibility with how Unix systems have
>> always been set up.
>>
> CentOS 5 is based upon RHEL5 and it does use MANPATH. 

I can confirm this behavior for RHEL5 itself.  Its man command definitely 
uses MANPATH, and is documented to use it.

But man also uses a configuration file (/etc/man.config) to set its default 
search path if MANPATH is not set.  If MANPATH has a trailing colon, then 
the default paths are searched as well as those in MANPATH.  This is what 
would happen if you set MANPATH to 
/usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/man:$MANPATH and MANPATH does not 
initially exist.  So the configuration of MANPATH done by TeXLive appears 
to be correct for RHEL5.

I haven't checked explicitly whether this also applies to INFOPATH, but it 
would be sensible if it did.

John