improve debiman’s mandocd handling to fail better when manpages trigger a timeout

[stapelberg]

mandoc 1.14.6 enters an infinite loop when converting md(4) to HTML:

curl -s https://manpages.debian.org/testing/mdadm/md.4.en.gz | ./mandoc -Thtml

Oddly enough, I didn’t catch this when doing the archive-wide re-render with 1.14.6rc1.

[thatguychuck]

Is there a workaround for this? I can't seem to get debiman to finish rendering using Bookworm as a base.

[stapelberg]

For manpages.debian.org, we currently apply the following 3 patches:
2024-03-05-mandoc-patches.zip

Hope that helps

[thatguychuck]

Thank you for the quick response! Applying the patches solved the issue for me. I was going to file a bug report against mandoc in debian but I see you are also the maintainer there? Thank you for the work you do on this great project.

[stapelberg]

The best way to get issues in mandoc fixed is to report the bugs upstream directly, not in the Debian issue tracker (that’s just extra effort) :)