4.1.2 Required packages

Activating a profile essentially boils down to exporting a bunch of environmental variables. This is the role of the ‘etc/profile’ within the profile.

Note: Only the environmental variables of the packages that consume them will be set.

For instance, ‘MANPATH’ won’t be set if there is no consumer application for man pages within the profile. So if you need to transparently access man pages once the profile is loaded, you’ve got two options:

• Either export the variable manually, e.g.

  export MANPATH=/path/to/profile${MANPATH:+:}$MANPATH
  

• Or include ‘man-db’ to the profile manifest.

The same is true for ‘INFOPATH’ (you can install ‘info-reader’), ‘PKG_CONFIG_PATH’ (install ‘pkg-config’), etc.