Re: Location of Guix manpages in foreign distribution

[Suhail <suhail@bayesians.ca>]

"Christina O'Donnell" <cdo@mutix.org> writes:

> If I'm not mistaken, ~/.config/guix/ is only for the environment that Guix
> itself runs in.

Yes, and the specific manuals (manpages instead of info) I was looking
for were for the installed Guix version.  It's unclear if the manpages
for Guix were ever installed.  It's possible they were, but subsequent
updates through "sudo -i guix pull" didn't maintain them.

Upon digging some more, I realized that "guix" doesn't have an output
that only generates the manpages.  So doing something like "guix install
guix:manpages" was a no-go.  Additionally, even if something like that
had existed the version I would've gotten would have lagged behind the
Guix installed on the system.  Doing a "guix install guix" will get you
access to the Guix manpages, but will also override the system Guix with
a slightly older revision.  The latter being undesirable for my needs.

It turns out Guix, when built, generates the manpages via a tool called
help2man which generates manpages from the --help and --version output.
So a not-as-well-formatted alternative to something like "man guix-gc"
is simply to invoke "guix gc --help".  On Emacs, this can be made
slightly more user-friendly via [noman].

[noman]: <https://github.com/andykuszyk/noman.el>

-- 
Suhail