More findings on this problem. The -helppath option is unfortunately not a complete solution, because Pd doesn't "dive" into the specified path's subdirectories. So, to make it work, I'd have to issue:
$ pd -helppath /opt/pkg/share/doc/pd/doc/5.reference
...but what if I need help from ../4.data.structures instead?
Pd seems to dive into subdirectories only when looking into its apparently hard-coded help paths.
I worked around the issue with:
# ln -s /opt/pkg/share/ /opt/pkg/lib/pd/
as hinted by Claude Heiland-Allen (thanks!). But this really shouldn't be needed, IMO.
In reply to some of IOhannes m zmölnig's remarks:
Pd-0.43??? current Pd is Pd-0.46; 0.43 is *several* years old.
Where can I find a ChangeLog to verify that this problem was dealt with in more recent Pd versions? I'd rather avoid compiling it "by hand" only to find the problem's still there.
esp, /opt/pkg/bin is *not* a standard path for Pd.
OK, but that's a Pd problem. Aside from /opt being explicitly mentioned in hier(7), none of the software I installed in /opt has a problem with this (except Pd). That includes Firefox, among many others. The concept of "standard path" is actually foreign to Unix[-like systems]. Common practices, at most.
so which is your system? suse, arch, foonix,...?
Slackware, but that is irrelevant: I didn't install Pd via Slackware's package manager, I installed it via Pkgsrc¹ (hence the ad-hoc hierarchy).
More comments and hints are always welcome.
Cheers, Andrea
Note: ¹ http://www.pkgsrc.org/