Re: Behaviour of .so differs between mandoc and groff

[Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com>]

Ping. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? It's a small but 
persistent irritation on my system. :-)

Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com> writes:

> [1. text/plain]
>
> Hi all,
>
> On my Gentoo system, awk.1 simply contains an .so request whose
> argument is the man page for the actual awk implementation in 
> use,
> i.e. just:
>
>    .so gawk.1
>
> However, although this works when using man-db, it doesn't when 
> one is
> using mandoc instead, as on my system. Instead of gawk.1 being
> sourced, processed and displayed, i get output along the lines 
> of:
>
>    ()                                    ()
>            See the file gawk.1.
>
>
>    ()
>
> However, if i change the request in awk.1 to:
>
>    .so man1/gawk.1
>
> then everything works as expected.
>
> The example in the entry for .so in mandoc_roff(7) is what led 
> me to
> try the preceding, but there's no further indication that the
> requirement for a leading section directory is consciously 
> different
> from any other roff implementation, or from groff in 
> particular. A
> comment in roff_so() in mandoc/roff.c[a] says:
>
>    /*
>    /* Handle `so'.  Be EXTREMELY careful, as we shouldn't be
>     * opening anything that's not in our cwd or anything beneath
>     * it.  Thus, explicitly disallow traversing up the
>       file-system
>     * or using absolute paths.
>     */
>
> i couldn't find any discussion about .so in the mandoc TODO 
> list[b].
>
> i've no idea what the 'correct' behaviour 'should' be, from 
> whatever
> perspective (historical / security / groff-compatibility / 
> etc.), so
> am cross-posting to what i believe to be the relevant lists.
>
>
> Alexis.
>
> [a]
> https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/mandoc/roff.c?rev=1.395&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
>
> [b]
> https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/mandoc/TODO?rev=1.327&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

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