Bug#541147: lintian: Please use single quotes in message manpage-has-errors-from-man

[Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net>]

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

> Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net> writes:
>
>> Package: lintian
>> Version: 2.2.13
>> Severity: minor
>>
>> An examples, trying to get more information, putting the lintian message
>> in double quotes:
>>
>>   $ echo "W: wcd: manpage-has-errors-from-man usr/share/man/man1/wcd.1.gz 1: warning: `PU' not defined" | lintian-info
>>   <line hangs>
>>
>> Oh, there is backtick....
>>
>> SUGGESTION:
>>
>> Please present inly single quote characters in messages, that is, avoid
>> use of:
>>
>>     `text'
>>
>> and use
>>
>>     'text'
>
> That output comes from man, and there I believe from groff.  I don't think
> it's appropriate for Lintian to try to rewrite error messages from
> external programs.

I think that would be appropriate. The users see only lintian reporting
the errors and they don't know or care the underlying machinery.

It's highly inconvenient to not be able to pipe the message through
lintian-info(1) to undestand what's going on. (Good explanation btw).

> I can reassign it to groff.  I don't know how likely the maintainer will
> be to want to change this, though.

I'll even submit a patch to expedite that.

In the mean time, please reconsider.

Jari