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Re: Bug#377392: Bug#450432: ... and even more bugs like this?



On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 12:32:26AM +0600, Ivan Shmakov wrote:
> 	In a recent thread in debian-devel, it was suggested that
> 	lintian could call man(1) in such a way that the groff(1),
> 	called by `man', will emit warnings for every undefined macro,
> 	which is useful in catching the bugs like this:
> 
> .B foo
> .  Note: ...
> 
> 	Below is the patch that implements the suggestion.  Since `man'
> 	doesn't allow the `-wmac' option to be passed to `groff' by any
> 	other means, I've had to introduce two new files -- `mdoc.local'
> 	and `man.local' (to override the files in groff/site-tmac/), and
> 	the ${LINTIAN_ROOT}/groff-hack directory to hold them.

While I haven't reviewed the code in detail, the general approach seems
largely reasonable to me. However, the error the developer sees will
just be "manpage-has-errors-from-man", which in fact is no longer really
true in this case; you're specifically enabling warnings that man
doesn't show. Perhaps it would be best to turn these warnings from groff
into a different lintian warning which can have a more informative
description, and ideally a way for the developer to reproduce the
problem.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]



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