Re: git help error

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Sergei Organov <osv@javad.com> writes:

> 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().