Midnight Commander/nroff hangs when trying to display certain files

[Jim Holland <debian@mango.zw>]

Hi all

I am running mc-4.6.1 compiled from the unstable Debian source package 
under Debian Sarge.

I have occasionally come across problems with displaying files using F3.  
Either I get repeated error messages such as:

	warning [p 1, 9.8i]: cannot adjust line

displayed on the screen before the file is displayed, or else MC hangs 
completely.

I investigated further when one particular RFC-822 message file always
caused MC to hang. The command that was being run by MC to display the
file was:

	nroff -c -Tlatin1 -mandoc msg_remainder.1576tS.1

A check on Google indicates that the above warning "cannot adjust line" 
can be fixed by calling groff with the -Ww parameter to eliminate warning 
messages.  I therefore edited the following line in the /usr/bin/nroff 
script (which is generally used for displaying man pages):

	PATH=$GROFF_BIN_PATH:$PATH groff -mtty-char $T $opts ${1+"$@"}
to
	PATH=$GROFF_BIN_PATH:$PATH groff -Ww -mtty-char $T $opts ${1+"$@"}

and this appears to have fixed the problem.  Ironically the above section 
is preceded by the following comments in the script:

	# This shell script is intended for use with man, so warnings are
	# probably not wanted.  Also load nroff-style character definitions.

In addition, the man page for nroff states explicitly:

NOTES
	This shell script is basically intended for use with man(1), so 
	warnings are suppressed.

(but they are not)

I see that Red Hat 7.1 has the following equivalent line in their nroff
script:

	PATH=$GROFF_BIN_PATH:$PATH groff $safer -Wall -mtty-char $T $opts ${1+"$@"}

which inhibits all except a handful of warning messages.

Is this not a problem that should be fixed in the Debian distributions?  
Perhaps the testing/unstable versions have changed it already.

Regards

Jim Holland
System Administrator
MANGO - Zimbabwe's non-profit e-mail system