bug#37761: man pages not displaying on Guix System 1.0.1 fresh install

[Kenan Toker <kenan@kdtsh.net>]

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Hi bug-guix,

I’m emailing about an issue I was having with man pages, where man pages
were not displaying on a fresh install of Guix System 1.0.1 on a
Thinkpad x200 laptop. I did not experience the issue at any point on
another install of Guix, which I had installed using the Guix System
1.0.0 installer in a QEMU virtual machine. I’ve outlined the issue
further along in this email.

The issue:
After I had installed man-db and man-pages, if I ran e.g. `man ls`, I
got an empty man page with the following at the footer of the page:

    Manual page ls(1) line ?/? (END) (press h for help or q to quit)

I was able to use the h key to look for help with man. When I pressed q
to quit, I got a message like the following from stdout:

    man: command exited with status 255: (cd
    /run/current-system/profile/share/man &&
    /gnu/store/[...]-man-db-2.8.5/libexec/man-db/zsoelim) | [...]


To replicate the issue:

 1. Do a clean install of Guix System using the 1.0.1 installer. The
    nurses installation wizard is used with standard settings, no WM/DE,
    and with one ext4 filesystem on / with disk encryption and a swap
    partition.
 2. Install `man-db’, either as a package in a profile or as a package
    in the OS configuration - in the case of the latter, do a `guix
    system reconfigure’ with the new OS configuration.
 3. Run the man command with any input, e.g. `man ls’ or `man pwd’.
 4. Install any other package, e.g. emacs, and run the man command with
    this too, i.e. `man emacs’.


My `solution’:
My solution was to do a fresh install of Guix System 1.0.0 (using the
ncurses installation wizard and with very similar settings, and doing
the fix for %base-packages) on my x200 laptop and update to the latest
distribution, which has made the issue go away; however, I was never
able to make the issue go away on my original Guix System 1.0.1
installation.

Of course, I can’t blame the issue on the installation image without
having a bigger picture of how the software works, but the installation
image I used is the only difference I could find between the two systems
I installed (with the caveat that I never tried installing Guix System
1.0.1 on a VM). If this can be replicated by anyone else, maybe there is
an issue with the installation image. If not, let me know if there is
any troubleshooting I can do which could be of use - I’m happy to do a
fresh install on my x200 and run any diagnostics you’d like me to.

Thanks,
Kenan


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