bug#30785: Man pages truncated, repeated

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi,

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr> skribis:

> On 2018-03-13 22:34, ludo@gnu.org wrote:
>>> However, even longer man pages such as bash(1) render without fail, so
>>> there might be something special about the two examples above that
>>> triggers this behaviour.
>>
>> I suspect something wrong with ‘knot.conf.5.gz’, but I don’t have
>> tangible evidence.
>
> Yup, that's about as far as I got before giving up and submitting to
> the wisdom of the crowd. We need someone who knows something —
> anything — about man pages, or someone who can reproduce this on
> another distro. I had no luck searching for similar bug reports.
>
> ...or do you mean with the knot.conf page *specifically*, as opposed
> to the rofi one? Is your suspicion based on something you saw in
> there?

I didn’t check the rofi one.  The knot.conf one is generated by some
“docutils”, a reStructuredText thing, which is where my unfounded
suspicion comes from.  :-)

We’d need to analyze the nroff “code” in there to understand what’s
going on.

> For the record: apparently this doesn't happen on Debian, according to
> some fellow on IRC named ‘civodul’. There goes my brief hope that this
> was an (exclusively) upstream problem after all.

I think I know that person.  ;-)  Perhaps we could check how Debian
generates the page.  Do they have a patch for “docutils”?  Should we try
with a different version to see if that helps?

Cheers,
Ludo’.