Bug#966803: acute-accent-in-manual-page: false positive '\\'
On Thu, 19 Nov 2020, Felix Lechner wrote:
> Lintian points out only line 992, but not line 86 (see below). Does
> that mean Lintian was right but used a misleading tag name? Thanks!
Lintian pointed out the ‘'’ part, but it’s the ‘\\’ part which
this subthread was about for.
Background: I was looking for the acute-accent-related bug number
again to comment an override in another package (#966316 though)
by searching for acute, found this and, having worked with nroff
(AT&T’s, even) quite a bit, decided to chime in.
In the xfig(1) case, there’s a *lot* of acute accents used though:
990 e.g., '$' or '\e', are not quoted but left untouched in the text string.
991 This is most useful for writing LaTeX equations.
992 If this flag is not set, then the backslash character '\\' is changed
(Funnily enough, line 990 gets using \e for the backslash right,
992 doesn’t.)
A sole 「'」 gets rendered as 「’」 in gnroff’s UTF-8 mode normally.
I think Debian disabled that due to exactly this issue.
But (as we can see in the *comment* lintian tags in #966316) using
「\'」 renders 「´」 which is usually wrong. This is what lintian is
supposed to tag. However, in this case, we have 「\\'」 which only
expands to 「\'」 if it’s part of a macro which is then later evaluated.
(This is why we use \e for the backslash incidentally.)
So, no, lintian was not right here either, but it was not entirely
wrong as, under certain circumstances, this _can_ be rendered as ´.
How to get lintian to DTRT, though, is… very difficult. I think you
need a full nroff parser (mdocml, while probably friendlier to modify,
only parses certain constructs, which may or may not be enough). Or
scan for ´ in the formatted output and suppress the tag if it doesn’t
occur, as a hack (if ´ occurs and is deliberate, people will have to
override the tag anyway).
bye,
//mirabilos
--
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