Subject: bug#4826: 23.1; woman-manpath, woman-man.conf-path on MS Windows with Cygwin

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:29:12 +0200

> From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
> Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:40:45 -0700
> 
> Seems like the default value of things like `man-path' on MS Windows
> should not be ("/usr/man" "/usr/share/man" "/usr/local/man").
>  
> I have Cygwin installed (but I'm not using Cygwin Emacs), but the
> default value does not reflect this. Even the doc string of
> `woman-manpath' says this:
>  
>  Microsoft platforms:
>  I recommend including drive letters explicitly, e.g.
>  
>    ("C:/Cygwin/usr/man/" "C:/Cygwin/usr/local/man").
>  
> One wonders who "I" is here

WoMan's author, I presume.

> why can't Emacs itself do something like that for the default
> value?

There's no standard place on Windows for man pages.  Everybody puts
them where they see fit.  How would Emacs know where to look?

> That default value, even if hard-coded, would be better for
> Windows users than the actual default value of ("/usr/man"
> "/usr/share/man" "/usr/local/man").

How can incorrect default value be better?  The current default
actually works for me (because I happen to have man pages installed in
these two directories on my disk D:).  So for me, changing the default
to something like C:/Cygwin/usr/man would be a step back.

If anything, I would suggest writing some code to look up the
directories in the default value on every drive that is on a local
hard disk, then perhaps do the same under /Cygwin on each drive.  But
that's hardly a simple change of the default to a different static
value.

> There is more chance that a Windows user has Cygwin installed than
> that the Unix directories will work!

I'm not sure this is true.  It's certainly false for me.  I have gobs
of man pages, and no Cygwin.