Apparently, man-db has groff-minimal as a regular input, so I guess we are lucky. So we could adapt groff-minimal only if we wanted to.
But that would mean that even after that, the "groff" package would still contain a memory corruption bug in preconv - which is arguably a security problem. Should we use grafts instead? Patch for the former is attached.
From adc9e7940b54e467732ec923c6a3fcec810dce48 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Danny Milosavljevic <dan...@scratchpost.org>
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2019 15:00:04 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] gnu: groff-minimal: Disable relocatability.
Tags: patch
* gnu/packages/groff.scm (groff-minimal)[arguments]<#:phases>
[disable-relocatability]: New phase.
---
gnu/packages/groff.scm | 30 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 30 insertions(+)
diff --git a/gnu/packages/groff.scm b/gnu/packages/groff.scm
index 77728a5d7..cf392f546 100644
--- a/gnu/packages/groff.scm
+++ b/gnu/packages/groff.scm
@@ -96,6 +96,36 @@ is usually the formatter of \"man\" documentation pages.")
,@(substitute-keyword-arguments (package-arguments groff)
((#:phases phases)
`(modify-phases ,phases
+ (add-after 'unpack 'disable-relocatability
+ (lambda _
+ ;; Groff contains a Rube Goldberg-esque relocator for the
+ ;; file "charset.alias".
+ ;; It tries to find the current executable using realpath,
+ ;; a do-it-yourself search in $PATH and so on.
+ ;; Furthermore, the routine that does the search is buggy
+ ;; in that it doesn't handle error cases when they arise.
+ ;; This causes preconv to segfault when trying to look up
+ ;; the file "charset.alias" in the NULL location.
+ ;; The "charset.alias" parser is a copy of gnulib's, and a
+ ;; non-broken version of gnulib's "charset.alias" parser
+ ;; is part of glibc's libcharset.
+ ;; However, groff unconditionally uses their own
+ ;; "charset.alias" parser, but then DOES NOT INSTALL the
+ ;; file "charset.alias" when glibc is too new.
+ ;; In Guix, our file "charset.alias" only contains an
+ ;; obscure alias for ASCII and nothing else.
+ ;; So just disable relocation and make the entire
+ ;; "charset.alias" lookup fail.
+ ;; See <https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=30785>
+ ;; for details.
+ (substitute* "src/libs/libgroff/Makefile.sub"
+ (("-DENABLE_RELOCATABLE=1") ""))
+ ;; That file contains a crash bug--so make sure that
+ ;; its contents are not there.
+ (call-with-output-file "src/libs/libgroff/relocate.cpp"
+ (lambda (port)
+ #t))
+ #t))
(add-after 'install 'remove-non-essential-programs
(lambda* (#:key outputs #:allow-other-keys)
;; Keep only the programs that man-db needs at run time,
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