Re: man v. info

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 03:02:25PM -0800, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> on Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 12:51:09PM -0600, Colin Watson
> (cjwatson@debian.org) wrote:
> > Come up with examples and send patches. That'll achieve results much
> > faster than anything else I can think of.
> 
> Specific instructions on how to do this?
> 
> I significantly reformatted the printcap(5) man page at one point and
> sent the result to the package maintainer, with no results or
> response.

This is, unfortunately, just a specific case of the general problem that
a lot of non-urgent problems don't get dealt with promptly, especially
if the maintainer isn't very active.

Do use the bug tracking system. In the case of printcap(5), a bug should
be filed against the three packages that contain it (lpr, lprng,
lpr-ppd), and I can't find anything from you against any of those
packages, although I was reading quickly so I could have missed it. If
you don't use the bug tracking system, then if a new maintainer takes
over the package he/she typically won't see the mail you sent, and your
work will have been wasted. Even active maintainers are more likely to
respond to things filed in the BTS, as it provides an automatic to-do
list.

(If you send me a bug by private mail that I can't deal with Right Now,
chances are I'll file it in the BTS myself, but I might not always
remember before my inbox floods onto another screen.)

> If you'll look at printcap manpage, you'll find that large portions of
> it are essentially "pre" formatted text (or the groff equivalent), and
> structured for a terminal window rather wider than 80 characters.

Probably depends on which package you're looking at. The version in lpr
uses mdoc's .Bl request to construct a list, and looks OK.

> Might be useful to go through the manpages and look for similar
> issues....

It should be possible to do this automatically.

  for x in `find /usr/share/man -type f`; do
    man -l $x | grep -q '.{81,}' && echo $x
  done

... or something morally equivalent.

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