** 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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