Subject: bug#30785: closed (Re: bug#30785: Man pages truncated, repeated)

From: [email-masked] (GNU bug Tracking System)
Date: Sun, 06 May 2018 13:55:01 +0000

Your bug report

#30785: Man pages truncated, repeated

which was filed against the guix package, has been closed.

The explanation is attached below, along with your original report.
If you require more details, please reply to [email-masked].

-- 
30785: http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=30785
GNU Bug Tracking System
Contact [email-masked] with problems

Subject: Re: bug#30785: Man pages truncated, repeated
From: Marius Bakke <[email-masked]>
To: Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 06 May 2018 15:53:59 +0200
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Marius Bakke <[email-masked]> writes:

> Marius Bakke <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <[email-masked]> writes:
>>
>>> Guix,
>>>
>>> Perhaps he's just getting old, but our man has a tendency to forget 
>>> where he was, start over from the beginning, and repeat himself several 
>>> times:
>>>
>>>    $ guix package -i knot rofi
>>>    $ man 5 knot.conf | grep -E '^(NAME|DESCRIPTION)'
>>>    NAME
>>>    DESCRIPTION
>>>    NAME
>>>    DESCRIPTION
>>>    NAME
>>>    DESCRIPTION
>>>    NAME
>>>    DESCRIPTION
>>>    NAME
>>>    $
>>
>> One thing rofi.1 and knot.conf.5 have in common is that they are both
>> unicode.  Whereas working pages are ASCII.
>
> This ultimately turned out to be due to man-db not finding "preconv".
>
> The attached patches fixes it.

I pushed the fix as 296551a2e9310d4a030ee49530e9367e73aaeecf.

Subject: Man pages truncated, repeated
From: Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 22:24:46 +0100
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Guix,

Perhaps he's just getting old, but our man has a tendency to forget 
where he was, start over from the beginning, and repeat himself several 
times:

   $ guix package -i knot rofi
   $ man 5 knot.conf | grep -E '^(NAME|DESCRIPTION)'
   NAME
   DESCRIPTION
   NAME
   DESCRIPTION
   NAME
   DESCRIPTION
   NAME
   DESCRIPTION
   NAME
   $

There's also some stderr...

   <standard input>:25: error: end of file while defining macro 
`UNINDENT'

...but I think that's just a symptom of the input being cut short; man 
rofi(1) prints no such error yet suffers the same fate.

The affected man pages themselves are not truncated, nor do they repeat:

   $ zgrep '\.SH' `man -w knot.conf`
   .SH NAME
   .SH DESCRIPTION
   .SH COMMENTS
   .SH INCLUDES
   .SH MODULE SECTION
   .SH SERVER SECTION
   .SH KEY SECTION
   .SH ACL SECTION
   .SH CONTROL SECTION
   .SH STATISTICS SECTION
   .SH KEYSTORE SECTION
   .SH SUBMISSION SECTION
   .SH POLICY SECTION
   .SH REMOTE SECTION
   .SH TEMPLATE SECTION
   .SH ZONE SECTION
   .SH LOGGING SECTION
   .SH AUTHOR
   .SH COPYRIGHT
   $

However, even longer man pages such as bash(1) render without fail, so 
there might be something special about the two examples above that 
triggers this behaviour.

Kind regards,

T G-R

Sent from a Web browser. Excuse or enjoy my brevity.