Re: [PATCH] Let git-help prefer man-pages installed with this version of git

Sergei Organov <osv@javad.com> writes:

While I almost agree with the rest of your sentence, you have to realize that it is obviously not obvious if somebody asked you to clarify.

How about this:

    Prepend $(prefix)/share/man to the MANPATH environment variable
    before invoking 'man' from help.c:show_man_page().  There may be
    other git documentation in the user's MANPATH but the user is asking
    a specific instance of git about its own documentation, so we'd
    better show the documentation for _that_ instance of git.

Having written that, it is very tempting to further clarify the above:

    Usually, if a user has his own version of git and regularly uses it
    by having the non-system executable directory (e.g. $HOME/bin/git)
    early in his $PATH, its corresponding documentation would also be in
    a non-system documentation directory (e.g. $HOME/man) early in his
    $MANPATH, and this change is a no-op.  The only case this change
    matters is where the user installs his own git outside of his $PATH
    and $MANPATH, and explicitly runs his git executable
    (e.g. "$HOME/junk/git-1.5.4/bin/git diff").

When you clarify it this way, the change does not look as useful anymore, does it? How typical would that use be, to run your git executable by always naming it by path without relying on $PATH environment variable?