Re: [Groff] character garble

[Zvezdan Petkovic]

On Sat, Oct 15, 2005 at 05:38:43AM -0600, D. E. Evans wrote:
> This is the original BSD man started in 1987.  OpenBSD is a
> continuation of NetBSD, a continuation of 386BSD, which is a
> branch of 4.3 BSD (and later 4.4 BSD Lite).  With only a few
> exceptions, groff being one of them, most of the software is
> original to BSD, and is not a project that would be familiar to
> GNU.

It's quite familiar to most of the people.


> I overwrote the existing groff 1.15 that was installed to the
> system, so I am fairly certain.  However, is there something I
> can do to test it to make sure?

Now, why on earth would you do this????
This could very well be the source of all your problems.
Why are you messing up with the carefully tuned system files.
What's wrong with installing groff-1.19.2 into another directory
(/usr/local/bin is used for external stuff on OpenBSD) and set your
PATH to have that directory first.

I personally put it in opt in my own home directory and have
$HOME/opt/bin first in my path.  Thus, groff-1.19.2 is always used
instead of the system's 1.15.  But I also didn't mess up anything in the
system.  Of course, when configuring groff for compilation you have to
pass the option --prefix=$HOME/opt and -with-X11-appresdir $HOME/opt/etc/X11
(I'm not sure of the exact name of this second option, but it's in the
help for configure).

Although, I still strongly believe that you need to set up the
environment variables as I told you before
        MANPAGER="more -R"
        export MANPAGER
Also, if you are trying SGR... don't forget to set it AND export it.

If it still doesn't work, you've learned important lessons.
        1. You _must_ read the documentation for a software.
        2. You never _ever_ use the root account to install the new
           software until you have it tested in your own account, by
           using configure appropriately.
        3. You never _ever_ overwrite the system files with your own
           stuff, because they will be overwritten on the first update
           of that system part.
I always thought OpenBSD users know better than this.

I wish you good luck and less use of rootly powers for no reason.

        Zvezdan Petkovic