registry team mailing list archive

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

** Description changed:

  After running "sudo catman" to update the man page cache, the display of
  some man pages will be completely corrupted. Deleting the corresponding
  entries in /var/cache/man/cat[1-8]/ will bring back the original man
  pages.
  
  I can reproduce this problem with man-db 2.5.7-3, but not with previous
  2.5.6-2. I feel that it can be related to the following upstream change
  in 2.5.7-1:
  
  >     - Always save cat pages in UTF-8 (closes: #446741).
  
  I see the following pipe being run:
  
  /usr/bin/zsoelim | /usr/lib/man-db/manconv -f UTF-8:ISO-8859-1 -t
  ANSI_X3.4-1968//IGNORE | tbl | nroff -mandoc -Tascii | gzip -c7 | iconv
  -c -f ANSI_X3.4-1968 -t UTF-8//TRANSLIT
  
  This is very wrong because it tries to convert gzip-compressed data from
  ASCII to UTF-8! Oh noes!
  
  == Regression details ==
  Discovered in version: 2.5.7-2 (lucid), 2.5.7-3 (maverick)
  Last known good version: 2.5.6-2 (karmic)
  
+ == SRU details ==
+ Impact: Preformatted manual pages ("cat pages") may be corrupted by running iconv after compression rather than before.  This is a regression introduced upstream in man-db 2.5.7.
+ Patch: Fixed upstream in http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~cjwatson/man-db/trunk/revision/1220 and backported trivially to Debian and Ubuntu Maverick.  No problems reported.
+ TEST CASE: Run 'sudo catman 1', then make sure you're using an 80-column terminal window (so that cat pages are used) and run 'LC_ALL=C man a2p'.  The broken version will show binary garbage.  To clear out cat pages to test the working version, run 'sudo rm /var/cache/man/cat*/*'.
+ Regression potential: None seems likely, and the test case should be sufficient to catch misbuilds and the like.
+ 
  ---
  Original question by Thinboy00:
  
  Some man pages are appearing corrupt (i.e. if I type man foo at the terminal, I get a bunch of caret escaped characters and a few ascii characters).  It looks as if man is reading the compressed data in /usr/share/man instead of uncompressing it first.  I will soon attach a screenshot of the problem.  The really confusing part, though, is that some man pages consistently appear corrupt and the others consistently appear correctly.  I've tried the following, to no avail:
  mandb
  mandb -t
  mandb -c
  catman
  And yes, I did remember to use sudo on those.  mandb -t said "whatis parse for /usr/share/man/[etc]:whatis parse for foo(x) failed" about some pages, but not every broken page (most of them appeared to be related to perl, but not all of them).  Since whatis is working correctly, I find it hard to believe that's the problem.  I also tried this:
  zcat /usr/man/man6/nethack.6.gz | less
  and it gave unformatted but readable output, even though man nethack doesn't work.  I tried the same trick with slashem, which does work correctly for man, and the zcat trick worked too.  I'm surprised their man pages behave differently since the pages themselves are practically identical.
  Is my copy of man broken?

-- 
Running catman makes man display junk data
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/615045
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