Trouble with man pages

[Leander Koornneef <leander@koornneef.net>]

Hi!

I was wondering if there are any known problems with the man pages for 
Debian/MIPS?
I ask this because I have the following problem, although I am not sure 
  this is a MIPS-specific problem. If not, then please accept my 
apologies for taking up your time :)

I am currently running Debian on my R5000 Indy, which is a stable 
machine, running kernel 2.4.2 and acting as mail server just fine.
However, the man pages do not work :(

Before, whenever I tried to call a man page, I would get the message: 
"Formatting man page" and then the process would just exit.
Reinstallation of the man-db and groff packages from ftp.rfc822.org got 
me a little bit farther.....I now get a blank `pager` (which is used to 
view the man pages) screen with the following at the bottom:

	Manual page ls(1) line ?/? (END)

If I give the command `man -d <name_of_some_program>` I get lots of 
output that looks okay, except for the following bits:

	<snip>
	pre-processors `' from default
	<snip>
	compressing to temporary cat /var/cache/man/cat1/14042
	compressor exited with status 0
	fixing temporary cat's mode
	renaming temporary cat to /var/cache/man/cat1/ls.1.gz
	free_hashtab: 2 entries, 2 (100%) unique

	Found 1 man pages

So, it looks like there is something wrong with the processing/compression.
Also, if I try the groff command from the command-line, it results in a 
bus error and nothing else. The same counts for commands like "nroff" 
and "troff".
Everything else seems to work fine (pager/less/gzip etc.)
Re-creation of a man page with `man -c` creates a new gzipped file in 
/var/cache/man/cat1 which is only 20 bytes of size and cannot be 
unzipped. The gzipped files in /usr/share/man are okay, however.

I would really appreciate any suggestions, because I am running out of 
ideas :'(


Kind regards,

Leander Koornneef

------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1555, Nostradamus wrote:
'Come the millennium, month 12, in the home of greatest power, the 
village idiot will come forth to be acclaimed the leader.'