Bugzilla Bug 189639

The erlang distribution ships its own man pages, which it expects to be
installed in the erlang lib directory (So /usr/lib/erlang/man by default). 
These are then accessible via "erl -man foo" and the erlang-mode for emacs has
ERLANG-MAN-MODULE and ERLANG-MAN-FUNCTION which also look there.

The current ebuild installs these in /usr/share/man*erl, but provides no way to
get to them (that I can find).

The simplest thing, I think, would be to install these where Erlang expects
them to be in ERL_LIBDIR/man/man*, since they're not system man-pages, but
rather Erlang man-pages (They shouldn't be accessible from man, but should be
from "erl -man").

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install dev-lang/erlang
2. erl -man erl
Actual Results:  
$ erl -man erl
No manual entry for erl


Expected Results:  
$ erl -man erl
...produces a man page.

On the other hand I cannot reproduce it.  Neither with 22.1 nor CVS 22.1.50.

> On the other hand I cannot reproduce it.  Neither with 22.1 nor CVS 22.1.50.

Sorry, wrong bug. :)(In reply to comment #1)

Moved to the canonical location, though the build system does have an option
named --disable-erlang-mandir which does what we do now manually in connection
with ERL_MANEXT=erl.  Anyway, your proposed fix looks better.

(In reply to comment #0)
> The simplest thing, I think, would be to install these where Erlang expects
> them to be in ERL_LIBDIR/man/man*, since they're not system man-pages, but
> rather Erlang man-pages (They shouldn't be accessible from man, but should be
> from "erl -man").

This argument is completely bogus. If something has to be fixed is 'erl -man'
to make it look in the proper man directories.

Either that, or we add proper entries in /etc/man.conf so man finds those pages
too.

- ferdy

(In reply to comment #4)
> This argument is completely bogus. If something has to be fixed is 'erl -man'
> to make it look in the proper man directories.
> 
> Either that, or we add proper entries in /etc/man.conf so man finds those pages
> too.

They aren't system man pages.  'erl -man' is like ri for ruby, or info for
elisp, or pydoc for python.  Just because the Erlang/OTP team decided to use
the same file format and same sort of display doesn't mean we should put the
files in the same place.

(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #0)
> > The simplest thing, I think, would be to install these where Erlang expects
> > them to be in ERL_LIBDIR/man/man*, since they're not system man-pages, but
> > rather Erlang man-pages (They shouldn't be accessible from man, but should be
> > from "erl -man").
> This argument is completely bogus. If something has to be fixed is 'erl -man'
> to make it look in the proper man directories.

 What I could read from upstream's comments in configure and other sources,
it's natural place should be ERL_LIBDIR.  Although there is a configure option
--disable-erlang-mandir which falls back to system standard location.

> Either that, or we add proper entries in /etc/man.conf so man finds those pages
> too.

 That's something I would consider.

To make everyone happy, there is now a 90erlang env.d file installed with -r2
which sets MANPATH accordingly.  No revision bump as I think it is ridicolous
to let people compile it for nearly nothing.