man and glibc 2.1 breakage

[Fabrizio Polacco <fpolacco@icenet.fi>]

Hi all,
I'm the man-db maintainer (both upstream and downstream :-).
It seems that a lot of people is encountering problems running current
man (-69e) with glibc 2.1 .
Two different problems were found, in one case even on the same
installation:
 * pager not working properly (terminal settings gone)
 * infinite loop if /usr/local/man does not exist.

I am actually still running slink on all my machines, and I don't think
I can upgrade one of these within a couple of weeks, so I'm in the
impossibility to address those reports.
I need help.
In particular I have some questions:

 * does downgrading man-db to a previous version solve the problems?
 	(you can get all previous man -69? versions in
	ftp://icebox.icenet.fi/private/fpolacco/man-db/
	-- please don't report bugs against these :-)
 * does downgrading libc to a 2.0 version (while keeping latest man)
   solve the problems?
 * does recompiling man-db in a glibc-dev 2.1 env solve the problem?
 	(get packages man-db_2.3.10-69e.diff.gz man-db_2.3.10-69e.dsc
	and man-db_2.3.10.orig.tar.gz (this one has not changed in the
	last two years, so you can get it from an old source CD)
	dpkg-source -x man-db_2.3.10-69e.dsc
	cd man-db-2.3.10
	dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
	su root -c "dpkg -i ../man-db_2.3.10-69e_i386.deb"
	... wait for mandb to finish its task)

I don't know how much I will be on-line untill next tuesday.
Thank you for your cooperation,
fab
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| fabrizio.polacco@nokia.com                     gsm: +358 40 707 2468