malformed man pages [SOLVED]

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Dec 05), Sagara Wijetunga said:
> Dan Nelson wrote:
> >
> > Since your output differs from mine, the manpages are getting damaged
> > before they reach /usr/bin/less.
> >
> > Have you maybe installed your own copy of GNU groff?  The original
> > source enables ANSI escapes in manpages, but the version in FreeBSD
> > disables them.  Make sure your /usr/share/tmac/troffrc matches the
> > content at
> > http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/stable/8/contrib/groff/tmac/troffrc?view=markup
> > , especially the last 10 lines or so, and check for other installations
> > of groff.
>
> Yes, we have installed the groff-1.20.1.tar.gz from
> http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/ .
> 
> Patch our troffrc to match FreeBSD troffrc solved the problem. Any idea is
> this all we got to do?  Anyway, Dan, thank you very much for the info.

For all base FreeBSD packages that you have replaced, you should make sure
you apply any patches that were made to the FreeBSD version.  I'm not sure
of the official way to do this, but this seems reasonable:

 #  save typing later
 SVN=svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/

 # cd into a SVN checked-out copy of the source tree
 $ cd /u01/cvs/freebsd/stable/8/contrib/groff

 # determine which vendor branch the source came from, and what revision
 $ svn log -v | less

 # svn logs indicate that the last vendor import was 1.19.2
 # now generate a diff between the vendor source and the FreeBSD version
 $ svn diff $SVN/vendor/groff/1.19.2/contrib/groff $SVN/stable/8/contrib/groff

Unfortunately, the last step doesn't seem to work if you give it local
paths; they have to point to svn://svn.freebsd.org/ .

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com