Re: Lintian errors and warnings

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> wrote:
>Colin Watson wrote:
>>    You should not create hard links in the manual page directories, nor
>>    put absolute filenames in .so directives.
>
>Heh. There's a man page somewhere in debian that looks something like:
>
><a few man header-type things here>
>.so /usr/bin/foo
><a few man footer-type things here>
>
>You can probably imagine what an unholy mess of groff pretending to be
>shell comments and shell pretending to be groff comments are in
>/usr/bin/foo. :-)

*shudder* That's just vile. Modulo a few cleanups it might be possible
to use 'mandb --test' from lintian soon, or maybe to transcribe the lex
code into a lintian check directly. If I do that, I suspect I might
throw a warning in about the above.

Quite a few man pages seem to use .so to pull in macro sets, as it
happens - nmh pages use '.so /etc/nmh/tmac.h' to get the -mh macros, for
instance. They should probably start using .mso instead.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]