Package: help2man
Version: 1.40.10
Severity: wishlist
Dear Maintainer,
(This was discovered while coding a front-end menu for Debian's several
documentation types and corresponding viewers. My front-end hung,
when it did what follows...)
Since 'xfce4-clipman' has no CLI help, 'help2man xfce4-clipman'
returned nothing. During which 'xfce4-clipman' loaded a 2nd instance
of itself, (which stays resident); meanwhile 'help2man' waited for its
child processes to quit, making it look like it had hanged.
Fortunately I'd seen the extra 'clipman' icon show up in the system
tray. 'Ctrl-C' restored the command prompt.
Programming remedy: have 'help2man' timeout after a duration D. D
might be a function of the size of the executable's real path name and
the cstime (cumulative system time) of help2man's child processes.
After D, output an explanatory error message, then quit.
Meanwhile, a kludge for users:
# Run for half a second, then quit.
% timeout .5 help2man xfce4-clipman | man -l -
Terminated
Documentation remedy: perhaps programming a fix seems like a
reduplication of 'timeout', if so please consider documenting
the problem, along with a 'timeout' example.
HTH...
-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-2-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) (ignored: LC_ALL set to C)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Versions of packages help2man depends on:
ii dpkg 1.16.3
ii install-info 4.13a.dfsg.1-10
ii libc6 2.13-33
ii liblocale-gettext-perl 1.05-7+b1
ii perl 5.14.2-11
help2man recommends no packages.
help2man suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
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