Bug 287183 – sys-apps/man-1.6f-r3: wrong setting in /etc/man.conf causes bad formatting (unexpanded escape sequences)

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Martin Baselier 2009-10-01 00:11:48 UTC]

PAGER is set to /usr/bin/less -is instead of /usr/bin/less -is -R

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. man man and man emerge don't work properly, a lot of other manuals work fine

Actual Results:  
output is filled with escape sequences

Expected Results:  
a readable man page

in /etc/man.conf it should read:
PAGER		/usr/bin/less -is -R

and not 

PAGER		/usr/bin/less -is

[Comment 1 SpanKY 2009-10-04 00:38:22 UTC]

works for pretty much everyone.  i'm guessing you changed the default $LESS setting in your environment to not include the -R option ?

[Comment 2 Martin Baselier 2009-10-04 20:10:02 UTC]

(In reply to comment #1)
I haven't changed any environment variable yet. I installed gentoo a few weeks ago and so far I've only changed /etc/make.conf and /etc/portage/package.* but nothing concerning, man, less or groff. So it's pretty much a clean install.
FYI:
#echo $LESS
-R -M --shift 5

[Comment 3 SpanKY 2009-10-05 06:27:30 UTC]

so the question is why the default isnt working for you.  clearly such a simple issue should be noticed by many people if it were in the default setup.

can you take a screenshot (png) of a terminal with the bad display and post it as an attachment ?

[Comment 4 Martin Baselier 2009-10-07 10:50:54 UTC]

(In reply to comment #3)
After changing the PAGER setting in man.conf the man pages were good. When removing -R there, the problem does not occur anymore. So I have no option to reproduce it anymore. Before the output was filled with stuff like ESC[2m; in between the text. 

[Comment 5 SpanKY 2009-10-07 17:15:25 UTC]

is it possible you unset the env vars one time by accident ?  if i unset things, then i get the behavior you describe.  your suggested fix should go in, i just want to understand why/how you noticed it in the first place.

[Comment 6 Martin Baselier 2009-10-08 10:32:26 UTC]

I believe it happened after I changed the language settings. I hadn't properly set up the local settings at first. I noticed that some character, with accents weren't show properly. Instead it showed a question mark, both in thunar and the terminal. So I added these lines to /etc/locale.gen (there was no language chosen at first.) 
en_US ISO-8859-15
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
I also changed it in another config file from iso-8859-1 to iso-8859-15, of which I can't remember the name. Most manuals were good though, except for that of man and emerge and some other basic ones.

[Comment 7 SpanKY 2010-01-27 02:35:53 UTC]

man-1.6f-r4 adds the -R option by default