"Unable to mbstowcs()"

[Firefly7-7]

Hello again, I'm running into an error whenever I try to open a man page where is simply prints Unable to mbstowcs() and gives an error code of 2. For some reason this has gotten worse over time, though even still it never worked for some pages (qman). Some documentation for mbstowcs made me think that this was due to some special character issue at first, though now I'm wondering if this is due to some unobvious dependency.

[plp13]

Hi.

Typically, mbstowcs() will fail if it encounters a character that is invalid according to your character encoding. This has happened in the past: in issue #74, it was reported that Qman couldn't read its config file if LANG was set to C. Setting it to something like C.UTF-8 or en_US.UTF-8 would make the problem disappear (this issue was fixed by making Qman ignore config lines that couldn't be converted).

So, to begin, please make sure that your LANG is set to something that supports UTF-8 and let me know.

[Firefly7-7]

Checked, LANG=en_US.utf8. I also read through #74 and it seems I also have gcc version 14. However, it seems that LANG=en_US lets me open most pages, but with some display issues.

[plp13]

Display issues should be due to box-drawing characters needing UTF-8 to function. GCC 14 was just something we looked at, and shouldn't be an issue.

Only thing I can think of is that man on your system generates invalid output (Qman is a front-end to man, apropos and whatis.) What distro are you on?

Also, please make sure you are on devel since that's where all changes happen.

[Firefly7-7]

I'm on the guix system, but some of this issue also occurred on arch (specifically the cmus man page is the only one I'd found).

[plp13]

qman cmus works fine for me on Arch.

You are using mandb, correct? Not mandoc?

[Firefly7-7]

Correct, I am using mandb. If I try mandoc there are a myriad of other errors.

[plp13]

mandoc is supported, as are the man page systems used by FreeBSD and macOS, but you need to add the appropriate directive to the config file. Anyway, I digress.

I can't reproduce this issue, so I'm not sure how to proceed. Would it be possible for me to gain access to a machine where it's manifested?

[Firefly7-7]

Sure, once I set up a reverse proxy to my server I can give you a login.

I have also started testing using the devel branch, and it seems like it's unable to find man pages, despite them showing up on the index page. I checked the code to see if there's anything messing with MANPATH (because guix puts stuff in nonstandard locations) but can't see anything.

[plp13]

I have also started testing using the devel branch, and it seems like it's unable to find man pages, despite them showing up on the index page.

Some old versions of Linux's man command are unable to open pages like ls(1), requiring 1 ls instead.

On such systems, you must tell Qman to fall back to the old method, using the following directive:

[misc]
legacy_mandb=true

Of course, it may be something new. Unfortunately, every O/S and every Linux distro is different, and that's why we need packages.