Re: [Man-db-devel] man-db does not work on Solaris 11

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:39:53AM +0800, Clark J. Wang wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 3:59 PM, Clark J. Wang <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Sorry I did not found a man-db-users mailing list so I post here.

My apologies for the slow response.

> > I compiled libpipeline-1.2.0 and man-db-2.6.0.2 from source on a Solaris 11
> > system, then I useradd'ed a user named "man", then I ran mandb which really
> > took some time. But after that "man ls" outputted nothing.

I think you may be the first person to test man-db on Solaris (at least
to my knowledge) in quite some time, so a certain amount of bitrot
wouldn't surprise me too much.

Does 'make check' pass for you in both libpipeline and man-db?  If not,
what does it output?  (man-db's test suite is mostly just integration
and regression tests and could be a lot better, but libpipeline's test
suite is a fairly decent set of unit tests.)

> [bash-4.2] # /usr/local/man-db-2.6.0.2/bin/man ls | cat
> man: iconv_open ("ANSI_X3.4-1968//IGNORE", "UTF-8"): Invalid argument
> man: iconv_open ("ANSI_X3.4-1968//IGNORE", "UTF-8"): Invalid argument

That might indicate that you need to link man-db against an external GNU
libiconv, unless you can suggest a replacement for the //IGNORE GNUism
that works with your system's iconv.

       //IGNORE
              When  the  string  "//IGNORE"  is  appended  to  tocode,
              characters  that  cannot  be  represented  in the target
              character set will be silently discarded.

> gtroff: fatal error: can't find macro file g

This suggests that man-db has somehow misdetected your system as using
the Heirloom Documentation Tools when you're in fact using groff.  Could
you post the output of man-db's configure script?

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden