[Groff] Installing groff 1.19 from CVS breaks man(1)

[Eric S. Raymond]

Under Fedora Core 6, installing groff 1.19 from CVS totally breaks man(1).
All manual pages display as blank.  This appears to be the result of
a mismatch between what /etc/man.conf expects and the way groff-1.19
behaves.

Just to dispose of the obvious:

1) Yes, I did "configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man", and
   groff binaries appear to be in the right places.  (I had to link 
   /usr/bin/tbl to /usr/bin/gtbl.)

2) "zcat /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | /usr/bin/nroff -man" yields a 
   manual-page display, so the froff binaries are working.

Modifying /etc/man.conf so that

NROFF          /usr/bin/nroff -c --legacy NROFF_OLD_CHARSET -mandoc 2>/dev/null

becomes 

NROFF           /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 2>/dev/null

appears to solve the problem.  

I don't know whether this is a groff issue, a man issue, or a Fedora
packaging problem.  This mail is going to the man maintainer and the
groff list; please talk among yourselves until you figure out what needs 
to be done.

A good question to begin with is probably "why does that --legacy 
NROFF_OLD_CHARSET need to be there at all?"
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>