Re: How do I check out a package w/o installing it?

[Thompson, David]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 2:20 PM, Arun Isaac <address@hidden> wrote:
> George myglc2 Clemmer <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I tried to use 'guix environment' to check out znc this way ...
>>
>> guix environment --ad-hoc znc -- emacs -nw
>>
>> the znc man is unavailable ...
>
> I have been wondering the same. It would be nice if at least the man and
> info documentation was available somehow. What needs to be done in this
> regard?

If you want to use 'man', include the man-db package in your
environment. If you want to use 'info', include the info-reader
package (I think).

To be more general, there isn't any "magic" here.  The znc package
includes man pages in its output directory, but 'man' won't know about
it unless it's on $MANPATH.  In order to make Guix set the proper
MANPATH, you need to include man-db because that package is the one
that defines the native search path for MANPATH.  Check out the man-db
package recipe in gnu/packages/man.scm to see how we encode these
details.

Hope this helps,

- Dave