Re: Lintian man pages in pod
Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> writes:
> I understood from [1] that there has been an interest in rewriting the
> lintian man pages in POD, so I spent a couple of hours doing just that.
> I figured that the CHECKS and COLLECTION sections of the lintian manpage
> could mostly be auto-generated from checks/*.desc and collection/*.desc
> (respectively), which would save us time keeping them in sync.
> "generate-lintian-pod" was written for just that.
This is an excellent idea. Currently, those fields aren't used for
anything, so no one reviews them and updates them, and they duplicate the
(often scant) information in the man page. I think generating those
sections of the man page from the fields is exactly the right way to go.
> Do you think this would work, or would it be better just to keep this
> information static in the pod file and manually update it?
I vote for this -- please go ahead!
In fact, I think it would be fine to go a step further and do this POD
generation automatically as part of the build (rather than requiring
running the script in private/ manually). The reason why most of the
scripts in private aren't run automatically is because they rely on
network resources and other information that isn't available to a buildd
or in a chroot build environment for the package build, but that isn't the
case for this.
I'm ambivalent over whether the script should be moved out of private
since it isn't quite the same case as the scripts in private that are only
intended to be run manually. (private is kind of a weird name for the
directory anyway.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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