The Authority of the User

I used to believe that my computer was mine, and no program had any authority to do anything without my consent.  (This can probably be traced back to my days on Slashdot, a decade ago; if I didn't get the opinion from there, they certainly reinforced it.)  I believed I was sufficiently smart to manage my own software, without everyone's updater constantly nagging me to do so.  I especially didn't want the updater to do it on its own; this often lead to problems, especially when Firefox got updated behind the scenes while I was using it.  However, I liked automatic security updates on Linux, so I got rather used to restarting Firefox when links mysteriously failed to be followed, or menus and tabs couldn't be opened—these being the days before the "Firefox has been updated and needs to be restarted" notification.

Then, everything changed.

Quick tip: extending the man search path without $MANPATH

If you've ever tried to add a directory to man's search path, you've undoubtedly noticed that the MANPATH environment variable replaces rather than extends man's built-in search path.  Today, I rediscovered a clever little setup on a machine at work.

1. Copy /etc/man.config to somewhere in your home dir.  Mine seems to be at ~/.config/man/man.config for optimal redundant redundancy.  (I will say that keeping the "man.config" name of the file makes vim highlight it without additional fuss.)
2. Add your desired MANPATH lines to this file at whatever position you wish.  Don't forget to curse the lack of an include mechanism at this point, which prevents you from automatically getting changes to /etc/man.config.  Cheer up, because there probably won't be any.
3. Add an alias to your shell.  For bash, you would put something like alias man='man -C ~/.config/man/man.config' (which obviously includes the name of the file chosen in step 1) into ~/.bashrc.  Remember to source ~/.bashrc to make it take effect in the current session.

That's all!  Now when you run man, your personal manpages will be searched as well.

The documentation for man on the system in question claims that it will use $PATH to guess at additional man page locations, but this does not actually work for me.  Having a command in ~/.install/bin does not allow man to find the manpage in ~/.install/share/man.