bugDatabase-driven manual pager suite - Bugs: bug #50324, Bump or remove MAXDIRS

 
 

bug #50324: Bump or remove MAXDIRS

Submitted by:  None
Submitted on:  Thu 16 Feb 2017 08:42:43 AM UTC  
 
Category: NoneSeverity: 3 - Normal
Item Group: NoneStatus: None
Privacy: PublicAssigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open

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Thu 16 Feb 2017 08:42:43 AM UTC, original submission:

With a long enough $MANPATH, trying to look up a man page fails with

man: manpath list too long

From briefly looking at the source code, it seems this is due to the constant MAXDIRS which is set to 128.

Would it be possible to bump MAXDIRS to some significantly higher value, or allocate dynamically (limited then only by the system limit on environment variable sizes?)?

As to what is the real use for long $MANPATH's, in HPC environments it's common to use some variant of a "module" system to provide software not provided by the base system, provide multiple versions at the same time etc. Currently the most popular module system is probably lmod ( lmod.readthedocs.io/ ), often coupled with something like EasyBuild ( https://hpcugent.github.io/easybuild/ ) to build software and generate the corresponding module files. The module system allows end users to load/unload/search etc. modules, where loading a module brings some specific software package and a specific version into the user environment, typically by prepending to $PATH, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, $MANPATH, etc. Modules can also specify dependencies, meaning that loading a module causes other modules to be loaded as well. As you can probably imagine by now, this can lead to a situation where the $MANPATH becomes too long, and users are then unable to view man pages until they unload some modules (which may remove the man page they are trying to read from $MANPATH).

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    Date Changed By Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced By
    Tue 19 Dec 2017 11:46:47 AM UTCjlecCarbon-Copy-=>Added jlec

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