Manpages In The Software Warehouse

CONTENTS

Introduction

An important part of the Software Warehouse is the large amount of documentation kept online. One segment of this is the manpages distributed with many sofware programs.

Installation

Manpages are predominently installed under the /usr/sww/man directory, under the same names and sections as given by the authors of the programs. These files would accompany programs that are installed under the directory /usr/sww/bin.

For X11 clients, installed in /usr/sww/X11/bin, the manpages would be placed under /usr/sww/X11/man.

Using SWW Manpages

To use the manpages supplied by SWW, you must arrange for the "man" command to search the SWW manpages by setting your MANPATH environment variable. A typical setting might be:

setenv MANPATH $HOME/man:/usr/sww/man:/usr/sww/X11/man:/usr/man
The man directories should be searched in the same order as the bin directories in your binary search path; this will ensure that you see the manual pages that correspond to the programs you are actually running. The section Large Software Packages contains a list of directories you may wish to add to your MANPATH variable to access various SWW-supplied manpages.

Name Changes

One of the goals of the Software Warehouse is to be an enhance the computing environment without conflicting with the vendor-supplied software. Many times, though, a package we wish to install may be meant as a replacement for standard vendor software, and will be released under a name that, were it used in the installation, might cause confusion with software already in-place. Packages from the Free Software Foundation (GNU software) are a good example of this.

Where name conflicts arise, we may change the name of the installed binary and it's matching manpage. GNU software with a conflicting name is installed with a "g" prefixed to the name.

For example, all UNIX vendors supply the utility "ls". GNU's enhanced version of ls is made available through SWW. To avoid a name conflict and allow the user to access both the GNU and vendor-supplied programs, the GNU ls is installed on SWW as "gls", under /usr/sww/bin. This new name is also used for the manpage, gls(1).

Large Software Packages

The Software Warehouse contains many large software packages, such as Motif and Khoros, that contain hundreds of manpages. If these manpages were placed under the standard /usr/sww/man, there would be many new name conflicts; updating the package would also be much harder. So packages like this are often installed in seperate directories under /usr/sww, with their own bin, lib, and man subdirectories.

The following is a list of man directories that might be added to the MANPATH environment variable to access many of these additional manpages (some of these may not exist on some architectures):

sww-help@cs.berkeley.edu