asdf-vm/asdf

What is the best practice for making man pages accessible that are installed via asdf?

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#263 opened on Dec 18, 2017

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enhancementhelp wanted

Description

I've been using asdf for a little while now, and something I have noticed is that certain man pages for certain languages / tools aren't accessible after installing such language, i.e. elixir for example.

Presently I am using asdf v0.4.0 on macOS 10.12.6 and macOS does a little trickery to get the man pages loaded. For one, if a MANPATH environment variable is set the paths specified in /private/etc/man.conf are no longer searchable.

What does this mean? I.e. if I install the homebrew version of git it's manual / man page will become accessible via man git. However if I add say $HOME/.asdf/installs/elixir/1.5.2/man to an environment variable called MANPATH then I can no longer access the man page for git using the command man git.

The trivial solution that I have come up with is to symlink the $USER specific man pages for various languages I have installed via asdf to /usr/local/share/man which then makes them accessible, and I can run man elixir and man git.

However when I installed python 3.6.3 via asdf it was intelligent enough to add the man pages from my locally installed python and link them to the proper path. I have no idea how python set this up, is it something specific to python or something specific to the asdf-python version?

Contributor guide

Tech stack
None
Domain
developer experiencedocumentation
Issue type
research
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-3 hours
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
mostly clear
Prerequisites
familiarity with asdfunderstanding of man pagesknowledge of shell environment variables
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
40
Research direction
Investigate how asdf plugins currently handle man pages, particularly the asdf python plugin which seems to symlink automatically. Look at the asdf core documentation and plugin API to see if there is a recommended mechanism. Propose a standardized approach, possibly via a plugin hook or shim, that sets MANPATH correctly without breaking system man pages. Consider cross platform differences (macOS vs Linux). The discussion in the issue may contain viable workarounds.