[Bug 236092] lang/perl5.28: perldoc lacks formatting (bold/underline)

bugzilla-noreply at freebsd.org bugzilla-noreply at freebsd.org
Wed Feb 27 22:19:27 UTC 2019


https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=236092

            Bug ID: 236092
           Summary: lang/perl5.28: perldoc lacks formatting
                    (bold/underline)
           Product: Ports & Packages
           Version: Latest
          Hardware: Any
                OS: Any
            Status: New
          Severity: Affects Some People
          Priority: ---
         Component: Individual Port(s)
          Assignee: mat at FreeBSD.org
          Reporter: andrew.daugherity at gmail.com
             Flags: maintainer-feedback?(mat at FreeBSD.org)
          Assignee: mat at FreeBSD.org

After upgrading to perl 5.28, the man pages displayed by perldoc (e.g. 'perldoc
Digest') or via Perl scripts making use of pod2usage lack formatting such as
bold and underlining.  In fact, text which used to be underlined is now wrapped
in *asterisks* (bold text is just displayed as normal text.)

This is apparently due to an upstream change in Perl, and I found a Debian bug
report about it: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=917530

They propose two possible workarounds:
    export PERLDOC=-oTerm PERLDOC_PAGER='less -R' # works like Stretch, Jessie
    export PERLDOC=-oMan                          # works like Wheezy

Here are my findings for various perldoc output settings:
-oMan does not work at all on FreeBSD, presumably because we use mandoc
instead?

-oTerm displays a properly-formatted page if PERLDOC_PAGER (or equivalent PAGER
or LESS env vars) is set; without that, you see escape codes (similar to bug
#162463).  On a system still on Perl 5.26, -oTerm works properly without any
additional setting (I think it's always invoking 'less -R', and the upstream
change for 5.28 no longer does that?).

-otext (on all versions) produces the output now seen by default in 5.28, e.g.
"*underlined text*".

-omandoc produces the same output as -otext on 5.28, but on 5.26 it produces
formatted output like -oterm.  Is mandoc the default output on FreeBSD?

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