[gentoo-dev] Issues with man - .so directive doesn't like .gzed man pages

[Karl Trygve Kalleberg <karltk@prosalg.no>]

Some man pages, for instance zshall, do not work as they should since 
we .gz our man files.

The .so directive in a man file is afaik the mechanism by which one man
page can include the contents of another. The processing of the .so
directive fails when the file to be included is gzipped.

For an example of this, merge zsh-4 and do man zshall ; you will notice
that large parts of the document is blank (I'm using most as my pager).

It might be that there is a compile-time option to man so that it handles
this, I wouldn't know. It might also be that the problem is so tricky to
fix that the easiest workaround is to add extra workaround code into the
ebuilds for packages that use .so in their man pages.

If nobody better qualified comes along within week's end, I'll have a
thorough look at the problem.


Kind regards,

Karl T