Bug#542584: [checks/manpages] false positives for some man pages?
Michal Čihař <nijel@debian.org> writes:
> I'm not sure how to debug this issue, but lintian is complaining about
> some errors in man pages, where I'm unable to get same errors from man.
> The problematic thing is line adjustment:
> W: rpm: manpage-has-errors-from-man usr/share/man/man8/rpmbuild.8.gz 85:
> warning [p 2, 0.0i]: cannot adjust line
> I've added patch to add \: at several places, what should ensure that
> groff is able to adjust he line and it actually is able, but I still get
> the warning from lintian even though man does not complain anymore:
> $ LANG=C man --warnings -l /usr/share/man/man8/rpmbuild.8.gz >/dev/null
> $
> There must be some difference how lintian does the man page checks,
> which makes it warn in cases when it probably should not.
> The questioned man page is attached to this bug report or in package rpm
> in case you want to test it.
As near as I can tell, Lintian is just passing along the information from
man-db. When I save your attachment and run man, I get the same output:
windlord:~/tmp> env LANG=C man --warnings -l ./rpmbuild.8.gz > /dev/null
<standard input>:85: warning [p 2, 0.0i]: cannot adjust line
Could you be running this command in a wide xterm? It's sensitive to the
width of the terminal. You can also set MANWIDTH to 80 in the environment
to force the line length.
I agree that man or groff does manage to split the line around a colon,
but that doesn't seem to be something that it's willing to do without a
warning.
I'll update the Lintian tag description to include the MANWIDTH hint. I
think the rest is either a man-db or groff problem or a place where the
man page should be formatted differently. (I have no strong personal
opinion between the two.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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