Bug#947258: lintian: manpage-without-executable is too strict (false positives for subcommand man pages)

[Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com>]

Hi Daniel,

On Mon, Dec 23, 2019 at 10:06 AM Daniel Kahn Gillmor
<dkg@fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
>
> If there is a way that notmuch, git, and other subcommand-style tools
> should be annotating their manpages to avoid triggering this lintian
> report, please update lintian's tag description to point to how to do
> this.

So far, I learned that 'man' interprets two commands by default as a
sub-command [1] but I do not know how to tell from a man page that it
is for a sub-command like 'git add' instead of a command called
git-add.

I do not believe there is an annotation for it, although there
probably should be.

Unless someone has a better idea, I think we have parse the output
generated by 'groff -man -Tascii'. Similar to man's strategy [1] a man
page would be deemed to relate to a sub-command when the first two
words in the synopsis, connected by a hyphen, are the same as the file
name.

Kind regards
Felix Lechner

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/32750157