Debian MC hangs when trying to display certain files

[Jim Holland <mc 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:

        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.

I don't know if this is just a Debian issue, but see that Red Hat 7.1 has 
the following equivalent line in the nroff script:

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

which inhibits all except a handful of warning messages.

Regards

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