Slackware 14.2beta - midnight-commander and reading man pages
 

Hi...
on Slackware 14.1 i used midnight-commander as a man page viewer... navigate to /usr/man/man1 and press F3 to view the selected man page (yes i know i can use man xyz from the command line... thats not the question).

On Slackware 14.2beta i get an error message, see screenshot 1. The error looks somewhat incomplete. If i repeat trying to open the man page i get a different (more complete) error message, see screenshot 2.

Can someone please verify this?
Thanks.

Yes, happens here too. I suspect the 'mc' devs just assumed that everyone would be using the same implementation of man as they are. The script in question is /usr/libexec/mc/ext.d/text.sh.

Thanks for testing. Looks like this has been fixed in the current development version of mc by removing the -l option. Here is the commit with the patch attached and here is the ticket. I have tested it here and it seem to work.

Attached is a patch that applies the upstream fix to the current SlackBuild for mc 4.8.15 in Slackware-current.

Use the package man-db instead of the man package.
mc then operates correctly.

This was corrected in yesterday's updates to -current, so this is no longer a reason to switch to man-db (although, there could be others).