“man snap” gets narrower and narrower until it’s 1 word/line

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

snapd 2.37.1, Ubuntu 14.04

1. At a terminal of any size, enter “man snap”.
2. Scroll through the man page.

What happens:
* Some sections of the man page are the same width as the previous section.
* Other sections are 7 characters narrower than the previous section.
* The result is that the man page eventually has only one word per line.

The same result happens for these commands (suggested by John Lenton):
* snap help --man | man -l -
* snap help --man < /dev/null | man -l -

It does not happen for any other man page that I’ve seen.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This was fixed in groff upstream between 14.04 and 16.04, by https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=49abd7a9093ae903bb0032eb74d647fb481d2acb. However, snapd could work around it by not emitting doubled .TP lines in its man page output; as far as I can see it has no good reason to do so.

[John Lenton (chipaca)]

https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/6476 FWIW