Leopard shell annoyances

After having been bitten by the erroneous LANG=UTF-8 environment variable that Terminal added (you can disable it in the prefs under Advanced), I decided to figure out why man port would claim there is no man page for port.

The problem turns out to be not any misconfiguration of /etc/man.conf, that file is fine as it is. The real problem is the MANPATH environment variable that's shown up out of nowhere. Or rather, it's set by /usr/libexec/path_helper from the shell startup files. The goal of path_helper is to make it easy to add entries to everyone's PATH, in particular entries for X11. But path_helper doesn't seem to know that also setting MANPATH is a) unnecessary with a modern man program and b) detrimental, because setting MANPATH disables the automatic matching of man directories with bin directories in your PATH.

I fixed it by unsetting MANPATH in my shell startup file.

Open Document Format in Leopard

Scrolling through the 300+ New Features page at Apple I noticed a mention of ODF under the UNIX heading. Curious, I found an ODT file, right-clicked and there it was: under NeoOffice, TextEdit.app sat there claiming it knew how to open my document. Both opening and saving works, the fidelity is about what I'd expect. But there's more: the new QuickLook feature also works with ODT files (see the screenshot of part of the ODF spec itself). Just find a file in the Finder and press space to look inside.