Can't view man pages with Bwana 2.4

[cisko]

Can't view man pages with Bwana 2.4. The index appears to have been built but when a link is clicked a blank page is displayed. For example, when 'drutil' is clicked in the index, a page opens that contains a man search box, a heading that reads 'Manual pages under/usr/share/man', another header 'General Commands', a link for 'drutil', and a footer 'Bwana Created by Bruji'. Clicking on the 'drutil' link comes back to the same page. Man pages can be viewed in Terminal. I tried the following to fix the problem but no luck (not necessarily in the order listed):

Deleted and reinstalled Bwana 2.4
Deleted ~/Library/Caches/Bwana/ folder
Deleted ~/Library/Caches/Safari/ folder
Deleted ~/Library/Preferences/com.bruji.bwana.plist
Ran BSD maintenance scripts: daily, weekly, monthly
Updated prebinding
Repaired permissions

Prior to Version 2.4 I had been running Bwana 2.3 without problems.

System info: Power Mac G4/400, Mac OS X 10.4.11.

cisko

[Conor]

I couldn't replicate the bug, but I made some changes, give Bwana 2.4 a brand new download and try again. To refresh the index use man:index_refresh or the button on the top right of the index page, just to make sure everything is the same. Make sure to have any other version of Bwana in the trash as you never know which one launch services will open.

[cisko]

Concor,

Downloaded the modified version (image dated 23 Feb 2008 9:24 AM) of Bwana 2.4 from the Bruji website and installed per your instructions but still cannot view man pages. Also deleted system caches and rebuilt launch services database with OnyX. Tried version 2.3 again and it works OK. Noticed in version 2.3 that the Bwana cache contains 'manindex-.html' and 'commandname.html' entries whereas in version 2.4 the cache entries are 'manindex-.html' and 'manindex-commandname.html'. Also, for example, typing 'cal' in the search field returns a page that contains links for all man pages that have 'cal' in their names, e.g., locale(1), calloc(3), scalbn(3), etc., about 58 total. Clicking on any of the links does not display its page. Hope this helps.

cisko

[jpk]

Bwana 2.4 does not work with MANPATH shell variable in spite of the claims.

[Conor]

How and where are your manpath variables defined and what shell do you use?

[jpk]

I use tcsh.

"MANPATH" environment variable is defined in the rc.mine file, which is sourced in ~/.cshrc.

I think it should not matter where MANPATH is defined as long as it is defined. Quoting from the man manual:

ENVIRONMENT
MANPATH
If MANPATH is set, man uses it as the path to search for manual
page files. It overrides the configuration file and the auto-
matic search path ...

[Conor]

There was a bug using shells other than bash that would cause Bwana not to be able to find man pages if the capitalization was not correct. I had to set it to use the bash shell by default. I have updated the documentation and made it clear that you need to add the MANPATH to the bash shell environment or the global man.conf file. Thank you for letting me know.

[billyw]

Same problem here. I can't view man pages with Bwana 2.4.

Exactly the same phenomena as cisko encountered. The only difference is that I am using an intel-based Mac with Leopard 1.5.2.

Could you please help us to solve this problem? Or could you make the version 2.3 available for downloading?

I appreciate your work on this software and it really provides me much much convenience in viewing the manual page.

[Conor]

Try a new download of Bwana 2.4, be sure to remove all version currently on your computer so that Safari can't call an old version by mistake.

[billyw]

Thanks for your hints.

I did try as your suggested. But it still won't work. I assume what you mean by "removing the previous version of Bwana completely" is to repeat the procedure done by cisko.

After reinstall, the exact same phenomena occurred. Basically nothing changed as before.

[Conor]

Strange since the new version worked for Cisko. Are there any error in your console log from Bwana when you try viewing the pages?

[billyw]

Below is what I got in the console message. I am confused too.

4/9/08 3:43:49 PM [0x0-0x41041].com.bruji.bwana[21298] No manual entry for a2p.1.gz
4/9/08 3:43:49 PM [0x0-0x41041].com.bruji.bwana[21298] No manual entry for a2p.1

Do I need to setup MANPATH shell variable through .profile? I am using bash shell. I really don't think I need to do that. Since in the document, this is a way for adding additional manual path. I don't need to setup any additional manual path actually.

Are you sure cisko's problem is solved since I didn't see his post. I tried man:commandname, it will bring me to a partial search result page with all commands containing the commandname. Then when I clicked any of them, it show me the manual page is not available. And I noticed that the address is ended with "manindex-commandname.html". As I reported before, the same as Cisko's problem.

[Conor]

It's hard to debug when I can't reproduce the problem. If you have Xcode installed you could try stepping through the execution in the debugger to find the problem. Download the source, open it up and set a breakpoint (click the line number gutter) at line number 721. Run Bwana by typing command-y (Run and Debug) from Xcode, enter a man page in the Bwana window. The debugger should then stop at line 721 and you can use the step command to see each variable (use command-shift-y to bring up the debugger window as the Xcode 3.0 likes doing debugging inline and I find that harder to follow as you have to mouse the variable names to see their value). The result of that function should be the path to the manual page source, I am guessing the bug lies there as it doesn't seem to find the path. You can also try line 867 where having the path it tries to get the ASCII results for that path.

Doesn't hurt to try to add the MANPATH variable to the .profile as well as the /private/etc/man.conf file to make sure that not where the bug lies.

[billyw]

Hi Conor,

I think I found the problem.

The variable pathToManual in line 752 was set to a weird string. I guess it is caused by the encoding problem. Previously I setup my terminal to be able to display Chinese. But I don't remember how I did it.

I knew nothing on the syntax of objective c but seems to be interesting when coding it in Xcode.

Do you have any suggestion to make it compatible with different LOCALE or LANG? My default language setting is English only the terminal can display Chinese.

Many thanks for your reply for solving my problem.

[cisko]

Concor and billyw,

I never did get Bwana 2.4 to work. Other priorities have taken precedence lately not leaving any time to experiment further. When I do have some free time I plan to install MANPATH.

cisko