Re: lintian warnings from man pages due to too long lines
On Sun, 2019-09-01 at 09:06:34 +0200, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 01, 2019 at 12:03:16AM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > This has been going on for a while now, and even though I did ask Sven
> > about it on IRC some time ago, I cannot find any previous mention to
> > Helge (sorry if I did but forgot!). There are these following lintian
> > warnings emitted:
> >
> > W: dpkg-dev: manpage-has-errors-from-man usr/share/man/de/man1/dpkg-architecture.1.gz 276: warning [p 5, 4.5i]: cannot adjust line
> > W: dselect: manpage-has-errors-from-man usr/share/man/de/man1/dselect.1.gz 83: warning [p 1, 10.2i, div 'an-div', 0.0i]: cannot adjust line
> > W: dselect: manpage-has-errors-from-man usr/share/man/fr/man1/dselect.1.gz 81: warning [p 1, 10.0i, div 'an-div', 0.0i]: cannot adjust line
> >
> > Could we do something about the dpkg-dev German translation that triggers
> > this, or even the English original if there's some way to reword it so
> > that it does not make the translation hard to fix?
>
> These issues, if issues at all, are very minor. IMHO you could simply
> ignore them. I looked both at the source and at the rendered version of
> the translated dpkg-architecture.1, and everything is as expected.
> (Though I don't have an 80 column terminal at hand).
Right, the dpkg-architecture ones looked very strange. That ended up
being caused by the default output being justified. I've switched it
all now to be left aligned, and this has banished the warnings. :)
And this is something that would end up happening too once we switch
to POD as the source anyway.
> > I think the dselect one could be fixed by moving the --colour as an
> > alias below the --color one, but I've not tried that yet.
>
> I don't think it is worth the effort trying to "fix" these by
> rewording the orignal. Both the orginal as well as the translation
> have a reason to be as they are (the content matters), so changing the
> content (original string or translation) to fix a possible and very
> minor visual glitch is IMHO not the right path. Also this can occur
> again and again, as the original strings are updated.
I guess I agree in the sense that it's probably more important for the
(translated) text to be meaningful over being restricted to 80-char
columns. But if the problem can be avoided easily, I'd rather to that.
For the dselect problem, I've ended up splitting the options, because
that's the general style in the rest of the code base and man pages
anyway, which also fixed this particular instance.
Thanks,
Guillem
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