Subject: bug#5578: 23.1.92; M-x man should consider $MANPATH when making completions

From: Colin Watson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:57:23 +0000

On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 02:12:31PM +0800, [email-masked] wrote:
> $ man -w whoami
> /usr/share/man/man1/whoami.1.gz
> $ man -k whoami
> whoami (1)           - print effective userid
> $ man -w sa-update
> /home/jidanni/.spamassassin-tree/man/man1/sa-update.1p
> $ man -k sa-update
> $
> 
> Well, OK, but to change things, the user must probably fiddle with
> /etc/manpath.config and run roots cronjob, when all he wants to do is
> expand the names and not look at the definitions...

Not at all.  Run mandb as your ordinary user and then 'man -k' will
work.

You may only care about the names, but if M-x man currently searches
definitions as well then that means a number of users have almost
certainly got used to that, and 'man -k' seems like a reasonable way to
do that kind of thing.  Having to make sure the database is up to date
seems like a not unreasonable price to pay, given that user manual
hierarchies are comparatively rare.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [[email-masked]]