Hide Forgot
Description of problem: With RHEL6.0 GA, I am getting "Error parsing *roff command from file /usr/share/man/man8/nslcd.8.gz" in the man page of nslcd Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): RHEL 6.0 How reproducible: Just run "man nslcd |& head" from shell. Actual results: ------------ Error parsing *roff command from file /usr/share/man/man8/nslcd.8.gz nslcd(8) System Manager’s Manual nslcd(8) NAME nslcd - local LDAP name service daemon. SYNOPSIS nslcd [ options ] ------------ Expected results: It should not throw any troff syntax error.
The manual page is a part of nss-pam-ldapd package.
The nslcd manual page is generated from docbook XML (using docbook2x-man) in the source tarball. It should fall back to the included troff files built as part of the release if docbook2x-man isn't available. The troff files included in the tarball work correctly on Debian.
We don't list docbook2x-man as a build-time requirement, so it turns out that we're not actually rebuilding the man page. The man command appears to be tripping up on the first line in the file ('\" -*- coding: utf-8 -*-). When I run Fedora's db2x_docbook2man command on the .xml file, I get something similar, but that initial single quote turns into a period (.\" -*- coding: us-ascii -*-), which 'man' seems to handle better. The package containing that command isn't in RHEL, though, so we can't do that. The man-db package, which replaces man in recent Fedora releases, also handles both versions of the file without problems, so in future releases this isn't an issue. So I guess the simplest thing is to patch that character from the tarball's man page when we compile for 6.x.
Created attachment 479603 [details] patch for build-time
This affects nslcd.conf(5) as well. However we work around this, we should make sure we get both.
The man page is already fixed in 692496, now this bug is removed from man-pages-overrides errata. I'm closing this bug (notabug).