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Hi gang. |
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(This problem is with the .so directive in man files which includes other |
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man |
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files into the current document, much like #include in C; if the included |
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file |
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is gzipped, man breaks down. Check man zshall (zsh) for example). |
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As far as I can see, nobody else has figured this one out yet, so I did a |
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little digging today. I didn't resolve the problem, but here are my |
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findings: |
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) An example .so directive: |
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.so man1/zshftp.1 |
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) The .so directive is by default interpreted by troff, not any external |
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program. |
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In the above case, troff does not find zshftp.1 (since it's only available |
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as zshftp.1.gz), and an error is printed to stderr. |
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) We can replace .so with .pso, which will allow us to use zcat, thus: |
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.pso zcat $MANDIR/man1/zshftp.1.gz |
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but this has two problems. First off, troff is by default running in safe |
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mode, and will not invoke any untrusted external programs, such as zcat; |
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this can be turned off with the -U switch to troff, but I don't like that. |
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Secondly, $MANDIR isn't really one directory, it is many, so we'd have |
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write a script that traverses the manpath to find the proper |
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man1/zshftp.1.gz file. |
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) I have not had the chance to see how this is resolved in other distros. |
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I would assume they either have enabled some configure option to troff, or |
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that they don't package all their man files. |
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|
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) Current workaround; unpack all man files that are includees. Includers |
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do not need to be unpacked. |
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I will look into the configure switches for man once I get net access |
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working again. |
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Kind regards, |
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Karl T |
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