Re: git help error

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 4, 2007, 19:40 UTC
Message-ID: <7vr6i245b4.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <874pey9uow.fsf@osv.gnss.ru>

Sergei Organov <osv@javad.com> writes:

Show 28 quoted lines

> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
>> "Aneesh Kumar" <aneesh.kumar@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> git help gives me the below error.
>>>
>>> [master@git]$ git help add
>>> No manual entry for git-add
>>> See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available.
>>> [master@git]$
>>>
>>> I have the git binaries installed via --prefix
>>>
>>> ./configure --prefix=/home/kvaneesh/bin-local/git/
>>> and to see the man page i have to say
>>>
>>> man -M /home/kvaneesh/bin-local/git/share/man/
>> ...
>> When you run "man" from the command line, can you say
>>
>>      $ man git-add
>>
>> and make it work?  If it fails the same way, then what you are missing
>> is MANPATH environment variable, isn't it?
>
> I think what the OP asked for makes sense. git-help should better find
> corresponding version of manual pages automatically. This way, if one
> invokes different versions of git-help, he will get corresponding
> version of help text.

I do not necessarily agree. Read what Aneesh wrote originally again, and read what he _didn't_ write.

Not only he needs to run his "man" with -M (and my point was that it is not the only way, by the way), he needs to futz with his $PATH to include $HOME/bin-local/git for _his_ installation to work.

I think my suggestion to use $MANPATH is in line with what he is already doing. If you install things in non-standard places, you can use environments to adjust to what you did, and that's the reason PATH and MANPATH environments are supported by your tools.

Having said that, I do not mind accepting a patch that prepends the nonlocal path to MANPATH in help.c::show_man_page().