Don't set $MANPATH - #1599

@abbeyj thanks for the contribution! How did you find this?

A coworker of mine noticed that their $MANPATH was pointing at a nonexistent directory and asked why. I figured out that it was getting set by /etc/profile.d/cfengine3.sh. This file is part of the cfengine-community RPM but the man pages are not shipped as part of this RPM, or any other RPM that I can find. So I'm assuming that when the man pages were dropped, removal of this part of profile.sh was overlooked. It would be easy to miss as nothing will really be broken by leaving this in place. It will just waste a few cycles on every login and on every invocation of man.

A coworker of mine noticed that their $MANPATH was pointing at a nonexistent directory and asked why. I figured out that it was getting set by /etc/profile.d/cfengine3.sh. This file is part of the cfengine-community RPM but the man pages are not shipped as part of this RPM, or any other RPM that I can find. So I'm assuming that when the man pages were dropped, removal of this part of profile.sh was overlooked. It would be easy to miss as nothing will really be broken by leaving this in place. It will just waste a few cycles on every login and on every invocation of man.

Very good. Thanks for the explanation. I'll take a look around and try to get this merged.

Marking this PR as stale due to inactivity; it will be closed in 7 days.

I believe this is still relevant and I'd still like to have it merged and not closed.

I believe this is still relevant and I'd still like to have it merged and not closed.

Absolutely. I am looking at this now and will try to resolve it one way or another. Thanks for the contribution!

This change looks correct to me. We now install man pages to standard locations and not in /var/cfengine/share/man as part of the post install scriptlets: https://github.com/cfengine/buildscripts/blob/master/packaging/common/cfengine-non-hub/postinstall.sh#L55-L64

  case `os_type` in
    redhat|debian)
      if [ -f /usr/share/man/man8/$i.8.gz ]; then
        rm -f /usr/share/man/man8/$i.8.gz
      fi
      if $PREFIX/bin/$i -M > /usr/share/man/man8/$i.8; then
        gzip /usr/share/man/man8/$i.8 || true
      fi
      ;;
  esac

Man pages printed out with the -M option go back to the time of your referenced commit of doc removals and further back.
I checked a rhel-8 system with 3.27.1 cfengine-community repos package and the man pages work fine and are indeed in /usr/share/man/man8 as expected from the scriptlet above.

@abbeyj Thanks for the contribution! We will take care of cherry picking this change back to LTS releases if we need to. Be well!

cherry picked #2541 and #2542