Hi Ash,

At 2025-12-09T21:38:00+0000, Ash Holland wrote:

When I invoke e.g. `man man`, I see a warning:

    /home/ash/.nix-profile/bin/man: can't resolve man7/groff_man.7

This is observed by others too: <https://askubuntu.com/q/1521258/478436>

To avoid this, we can simply ask troff not to emit this message:
<https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html#index-_002esoquiet>

I'm the GNU maintainer of groff and the author (instigator?) of the
`soquiet` request.  Your patch isn't wrong, but I must point out that
the `soquiet` request is new to groff 1.23.0 (which isn't that new
anymore--it was released in July 2023).

-.so man7/groff_man.7
+.soquiet man7/groff_man.7

If Alex applies this, it means the page redirection[1] will stop working
_where it had been before_ for any systems using groff 1.22.4 or older.

If Alex wants to make the Linux man-pages require groff 1.23.0 or later
(there's been no subsequent release, but I'm working on it[2]), that's
fine with me, but such a decision should be announced so that
distributors of man-pages packages can judge whether they need/want to
increment the versioning of their package dependencies accordingly.

Regards,
Branden

[1] that's not really what it is, but let's pretend
[2] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65099