Bug#625886: lintian: false positive spelling-error-in-manpage

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

tags 625886 pending
thanks

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:47:58PM +0200, Niels Thykier wrote:
> On 2011-05-06 17:42, Gennaro Oliva wrote:
> > in a manual page of my package there is this sentence:
> > 
> > The number of microseconds that the slurmctld daemon requires to process
> > an epilog completion message from the slurmd dameons.
> > 
> > and lintian complain about:
> > slurm-llnl: spelling-error-in-manpage usr/share/man/man5/slurm.conf.5.gz
> > requires to requires one to
> > 
> > I think that the sentence is correct even if I'm not a native English
> > speaker so I may be wrong.
> 
> I spoke/chatted with two UK people today and they said the sentence was
> "arguably" correct but implied it was sub-optimal.  Particularly:
> 
> """
> but it does look a little dubious - do I really have to tell it how long
> it takes? As opposed to how long I'm allowing it to take? or how long it
> should wait between sending messages?
> """

While this may be a reasonable point (I haven't read the full manual
page either), it doesn't really have anything to do with what Lintian is
trying to correct here.  Lintian is objecting to the verb "require"
apparently being used intransitively, which would be correct if it had
detected this accurately; but in fact the use of "require" here is
transitive in a relative clause, and is perfectly fine.  This seems to
be quite a common miscorrection: for example, there's a case of it in
the text of the GFDL.

I've removed this entry for the next Lintian release.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]