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

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:

> .IX is probably from pod2man, which does:

>   .\" If the F register is turned on, we'll generate index entries on stderr for
>   .\" titles (.TH), headers (.SH), subsections (.Sh), items (.Ip), and index
>   .\" entries marked with X<> in POD.  Of course, you'll have to process the
>   .\" output yourself in some meaningful fashion.
>   .if \nF \{\
>   .    de IX
>   .    tm Index:\\$1\t\\n%\t"\\$2"
>   ..
>   .    nr % 0
>   .    rr F
>   .\}

> Russ, perhaps this should be something like this instead to suppress the
> warning?

>   .\" If the F register is turned on, we'll generate index entries on stderr for
>   .\" titles (.TH), headers (.SH), subsections (.Sh), items (.Ip), and index
>   .\" entries marked with X<> in POD.  Of course, you'll have to process the
>   .\" output yourself in some meaningful fashion.
>   .ie \nF \{\
>   .    de IX
>   .    tm Index:\\$1\t\\n%\t"\\$2"
>   ..
>   .    nr % 0
>   .    rr F
>   .\}
>   .el \{\
>   .    de IX
>   ..
>   .\}

Sure, that seems reasonable.

>> W: dpkg-dev: manpage-has-errors-from-man usr/share/man/man1/dpkg-architecture.1.gz 104: warning: `C`' not defined

> I'm not entirely sure what all this line noise is trying to achieve.
> Looks to me like stuff like \f(CW\*(C`\-c\*(C' should just be \-c;

It's intentional in general.  I don't know why it's not defined, though.
\f(CW sets a fixed-width font, and \*(C` and \*(C' add "" when fonts
aren't supported but suppress the quotes when fonts are supported.
pod2man has done this for eons.

I haven't looked at this particular usage, but there are places where this
is exactly the desired markup.

Maybe there's some missing logic for defining empty strings?

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>