On 15/09/13 5:59 PM, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
Hi,
Brad Smith wrote on Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 03:38:06PM -0400:
On 15/09/13 3:18 PM, Brian Callahan wrote:
On 09/14/13 00:02, Kyle Isom wrote:
Update to 1.7. Tested working on amd64 and macppc.
I don't think this needs USE_GROFF=Yes anymore; otherwise ok by me if
someone wants to double check that.
Indeed, USE_GROFF isn't needed for this one.
USE_GROFF can be removed. mandoc points out two errors in the man
page but the page looks the same whether utilizing mandoc or
pre-formatting it with groff.
This made me curious, it sounded like something, somewhere, was
seriously broken. A mandoc(1) ERROR - as opposed to a WARNING -
is intended as a hint that the output is likely to be seriously
affected, often unusable. So, two ERRORs, but the output
is fine, you say? That made me have a look.
No, I did not say fine nor was I implying a mandoc bug. I said it looks
the same. Just no regression between mandoc and groff. The page
obviously had a pre-existing issue.
It turns out the manual page itself contains badly broken syntax,
so badly that important content gets completely lost during
formatting. In two places, the upstream author put the full stop
of a sentence in the first column, so roff mishandles it as a macro
indicator and basically loses the complete line.
That's one of the unusual cases where patching the *manual* makes
sense, even in the port, because it is required to let users see
the full text of the manual.
See below for an improved version of the port.
Sorry that i can't provide testing or an OK for the port as a whole,
it wouldn't be meaningful because i know too little about terminal
emulators.
Please feed the patch to the manual page upstream, too,
together with my explanation what the problem is.
Yes, the actual man page fix should be pushed upstream.
Note that mandoc(1) somehow starts being *too* good.
It manages to misformat the broken manual in *exactly* the same
way as groff. If both formatters would only misformat the buggy
code differently, it would have been more probable that anybody
of you (Kyle, Brian, or Brad) would have noticed the actual
problem... :-)
Looking at the issue I did notice one sentence was missing from the man
page output whether using groff or mandoc. But since it was a
pre-existing issue it was not a reason to hold back removing USE_GROFF.
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