Ubuntu – Man pages are shuffled

Thanks all for your suggestions.

I finally solved the problem and now man works.

Answer

Somebody installed both 64bit and 32bit version of glibc, which brings chaos I guess. After uninstall the 32bit version and reinstall 64bit version of glibc, man works.

== Detailed process ==

• Ran mandb -t, lots of error messages showed up:

iconv_open ("UTF-8//IGNORE", "ISO-8859-1"): Invalid argument

• By google I found that iconv_open is in gconv(ref).
• strace mandb -t and strace man ls both show this information:

open("/usr/lib64/gconv/gconv-modules.cache", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib64/gconv/gconv-modules", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

• By google I found that gconv-modules may be very important to iconv, which might be very important to man. And gconv is in glibc, now the best guess is that my glibc is not installed correctly.
• Ran rpm -qa | grep glibc, I got this:

glibc-i18ndata-2.11.1-0.17.4
glibc-locale-2.11.1-0.17.4
glibc-info-2.11.1-0.17.4
glibc-html-2.11.1-0.17.4
glibc-profile-2.11.1-0.17.4
glibc-devel-2.11.1-0.17.4
glibc-2.11.1-0.17.4
glibc-32bit-2.11.1-0.17.4
glibc-devel-32bit-2.11.1-0.17.4
glibc-locale-32bit-2.11.1-0.17.4
glibc-profile-32bit-2.11.1-0.17.4

• Ran rpm -e --nodeps 32bit-PACKAGE to remove all the 32bit packages, then reboot the machine(Any other way beside reboot?).
• Reinstalled all the 64bit glibc packages.
• man ls, it worked!

How to update the man page in man page mode while editing the roff source:

;;;; MAN / man
(defvar *curr-man* "~/mansv/ls.1")

(defun edman ()
  "edit the current work-in-progress man page"
  (interactive)
  (find-file *curr-man*) )

(defun upman () ; edit: better version of this function below
  "update the current work-in-progress man page"
  (interactive)
  (buffer-menu)
  (revert-buffer)
  (with-temp-buffer
    (progn
      (insert-buffer-substring "*Buffer List*")
      (beginning-of-buffer)
        (let ((man-buffer (format "*Man %s*" *curr-man*)))
          (if (word-search-forward man-buffer (point-max) t) ; t = nil on fail
            (kill-buffer man-buffer) ))
      (man *curr-man*)
      (edman)
      (kill-buffer "*Buffer List*") )))

EDIT

This version of upman is hopefully more stable. Note the introducton of a new global.

(defun upman ()
  "update the current work-in-progress man page"
  (interactive)
  (if (get-buffer *curr-man-file*) (save-buffer))
  (let ((man-buffer (format "*Man %s*" *curr-man*)))
    (if (get-buffer man-buffer) (kill-buffer man-buffer))
    (man *curr-man*)
    (edman) ))