Description of problem: Since I do not require UTF-8 support, I turned it off by setting LANG to C in my shell configuration, as well as in /etc/sysconfig. At about the same time, some man pages stopped displaying properly, exiting with an "iconv: illegal input sequence" error message. The man pages that failed to display failed every time. The man pages that worked worked every time. How reproducible: Always. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Execute this at the shell prompt: LANG=C man lockf or: LANG=en_US.iso88591 man lockf Actual results: iconv: illegal input sequence at position 126 Expected results: lockf man page displayed. Additional info: At first I didn't connect disabling UTF-8 with `man' malfunctioning, but after a serious attempt at debugging the problem, I made the connection. Apparently, it takes two things to trigger the bug: 1) The nroff source must contain raw Latin 1 characters. (Comments count.) 2) LANG must at a non-UTF-8 setting. `lockf' is a good example. If you unzip /usr/share/man/man3/lockf.3.gz, you'll notice a raw Latin 1 character. Remove it and the man page works. It seems that some part of `man' expects all manuals to be in UTF-8 when they're clearly not. Either the requirement should be dropped, or the man pages should be all converted to UTF-8. The latter solution doesn't address the problem of third-party man pages getting installed to the system. Perhaps a better solution would be for man not to treat invalid UTF-8 sequences as fatal errors.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 103214 ***
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.