Control: tag -1 wontfix On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 07:34:46PM +0000, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote: > Warnings and error messages are important to show possible > defects in a manual. Redirecting them to a file (e.g. > "/var/log/mandb.err") is better than discarding them.
I'm not convinced that it makes sense to catch them this way. We already have a better way to collect defects via Lintian, notably these two tags: https://lintian.debian.org/tags/manpage-has-bad-whatis-entry.html https://lintian.debian.org/tags/manpage-has-errors-from-man.html It would be possible to log all of these on every Debian system, yes. However, it would be a tremendously inefficient way to record these defects compared to the existing Lintian reports which are much more convenient for maintainers. Logging them locally would simply encourage people to duplicate lots of effort reporting them manually as bugs, which doesn't seem like a good use of time unless they're going to go to the extra effort to figure out patches too; and history indicates that some sizeable fraction of those reports will be misdirected to man-db and I'll have to spend time reassigning them to the right places. Furthermore, manual page errors are usually considered too minor to fix in stable releases, so users of stable will have a pile of error reports that are unlikely to be fixed at least until they upgrade to the next stable release. I can see some small value in logging these errors for the cases of packages which are not in Debian and thus not covered by Lintian runs, certainly. However, there are other ways to get hold of the same error messages (e.g. lexgrog), and in any case I think the benefits of this logging would be too small to outweigh the costs. Sorry, -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
