[Man-db-devel] man-db Guix package: preconv segfaults when hard-coded

[Pierre Neidhardt]

Hi,

I'm working on a bug that Guix (https://guix.info) has been experiencing
forever.

https://issues.guix.info/issue/30785

Long story short:  non-ASCII man pages don't display properly because
preconv (from groff) is not found.

Guix is not like most other distributions in that it's purely
functional, dependencies are not found in the PATH but they are
hard-coded.

man-db needs to find preconv.  So what we would typically do is patch
lib/encodings.c to point to preconv in the /gnu/store:


--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(substitute* "lib/encodings.c"
               (("const char \\*groff_preconv = NULL;")
                (string-append "const char *groff_preconv = \""
                               (assoc-ref inputs "groff-minimal")
                               "/bin/preconv"
                               "\";")))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Surprisingly, man only displays this on every call:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
/gnu/store/6dv1q0s8rlf1ndaqx2qhnkiz9x4840ba-man-db-2.8.3/bin/man: 
/gnu/store/mpjn4jfx5i8jxblfj538n22hv56rdnhw-groff-minimal-1.22.3/bin/preconv: 
Segmentation fault
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

However, calling

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
echo "hêlló"  | 
/gnu/store/mpjn4jfx5i8jxblfj538n22hv56rdnhw-groff-minimal-1.22.3/bin/preconv -e 
UTF-8
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

works.

It seems that it has something to do with libpipeline, but I'm not sure
what.

Is it wrong to create a pipeline with the full path to the executable?

--
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature