[erlang-questions] Re: Erlang manuals problem when installing from Homebrew

Michael Santos michael.santos@REDACTED
Wed Apr 6 21:22:08 CEST 2011


On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 07:26:00PM +0400, Dmitry Demeshchuk wrote:
> Fixing the recipe is obvious. But maybe the problem can be solved in a
> more proper way, like using some undocumented env variable, or
> something?
> 
> Actually, the fact that Erlang doesn't understand $MANPATH seems odd
> to me. Also, there are no proper manuals locations at the
> documentation, so the user will have to find them out himself.

erl reads the man pages like this:

    erts_snprintf(tmpStr, sizeof(tmpStr), "%s/man", rootdir);
    set_env("MANPATH", tmpStr);
    execvp("man", argv+i);

So it uses the location of the erlang install (e.g.,
/usr/local/lib/erlang), appends the "man" directory then overwrites
whatever is in your MANPATH environment variable.

The MANPATH variable still works:

$ man inets
No manual entry for inets
$ export MANPATH=/usr/local/lib/erlang/man
$ man inets
inets(3) ...


> On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 7:03 PM, Jack Moffitt <jack@REDACTED> wrote:
> >> The question is: is there the more right way to point Erlang to the
> >> right manuals directory?
> >
> > The more right way would be to fix the brew recipe.
> >
> > Thanks for finding that workaround though; I was having the same
> > problem but was too lazy to fix it.
> >
> > jack.
> >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Best regards,
> Dmitry Demeshchuk
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions



More information about the erlang-questions mailing list