Running "makewhatis -w" on the afflicted system fixed everything :)  Sorry
about the noise.

On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 8:15 PM Eric Hanchrow <eric.hanchrow@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Did that -- I tried again with -Q, after having moved ~/.emacs.d/elpa to
> ~/.emacs.d/elpa.hid.
>
> I then of course had to M-x list-packages RET and install ivy again; that
> turned out to get me ivy-0.12.0, so I updated the repro.el file to reflect
> that, then started over (with -Q of course); it did just the same thing.
>
> I started over, this time using the same git commit as the system which
> worked -- that failed too! So it's clearly not emacs.  I noticed that on
> the system that worked, "man -k ." yielded about 14000 lines of output,
> whereas on the system that failed, the same command yielded ".: nothing
> appropriate" ... so it's pretty likely that my "man" command is at fault,
> not Emacs.
>
> On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 12:20 PM Štěpán Němec <stepnem@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Do you have some site-wide init? (emacs -q still loads that)
>>
>> I'd try with emacs -Q and a clean package install (remove the
>> .emacs.d/elpa/ directory).
>>
>> --
>> Štěpán
>>
>