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



Control: affects 947258 + libreswan

On Fri 2020-05-22 10:46:29 -0700, Felix Lechner wrote:
> So far, I learned that 'man' interprets two commands by default as a
> sub-command [1] 
 […]
> [1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/32750157

Thanks for this pointer, interesting!

> 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.

I'm also unaware of anything like this.  I don't know where would be the
best place to try to establish such a convention.  Any suggestions?

> 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.

It's not just the hyphen -- we should consider connection by an
underscore as well (as libreswan's manpages do).

           --dkg

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