Re: UE/UR macros in manpages

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 03:49:34PM +0100, Martin Stigge wrote:
> as of version 1.23.43, lintian checks for warnings in manpages with
> man's new --warning option (with man since 2.5.1). For quite some
> packages, lintian will produce an error like this:
> 
> W: wmweather+: manpage-has-errors-from-man usr/share/man/man1/wmweather+.1x.gz 191: warning: `UR' not defined
> 
> This is because the groff version we have in Debian (which is used by
> man to render the manpage) does not support the UE and UR macro used by
> many manpages to specify URLs. (Instead, it supports the slightly less
> (?) powerful URL macro for that purpose.)
> 
> $ man --warnings -l wmweather+.1 1>/dev/null
> <standard input>:191: warning: `UR' not defined
> <standard input>:193: warning: `UE' not defined
> $

UR and UE used to be defined, and then were replaced by URL. However,
recently support for UR and UE was added back into upstream groff.

Could you please file a bug asking me to backport the relevant support,
and I'll get to it next time I have a chance?

> Actually it is not really a problem, since groff ignores macros it does
> not know, so the manpage is shown anyway as expected, just without the
> URL link being a link. Additionally, it might be more appropriate to add
> UR/UE support to our groff package than to patch each and every package
> to have this problem fixed. Meanwhile, lintian could get some
> appropriate override implemented, so that the warnings don't show up
> anymore.

Please leave lintian untouched in this regard; I don't expect that it
would take very long to backport the change in question.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]