Bug#878105: release-notes: problems building the release-notes (jessie) for the Debian website

[Laura Arjona Reina <larjona@debian.org>]

Package: release-notes
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

Dear release-notes maintainers
Thanks for your work in the release notes for every Debian release!

The script that automatically builds the release notes for the Debian website
throws some errors when building the release notes in PDF format.

Those errors appear for any architecture except armel and any language, for the
jessie release notes.

The errors are of the type:
---
Build stdin.pdf
xelatex failed
stdin.tex:292: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing \item.
stdin.tex:292: leading text: \end{description}
Unexpected error occured
Error: xelatex compilation failed
Makefile:214: recipe for target 'en/release-notes.amd64.pdf' failed
---

I've checked the "stdin.tex" generated file, did some tests, and probably the
culprit is this:

file jessie/en/whats-new.dbk

<variablelist>
  <varlistentry arch="armel">
    <term>Support for iop32x was dropped</term>
    <listitem>
      <para>
        On <systemitem role="arch">armel</systemitem>, support for
        the iop32x subarchitecture was dropped. Other
        <systemitem role="arch">armel</systemitem> subarchitectures
        continue to be supported, including ixp4xx, kirkwood, orion
        and versatile.
      </para>
    </listitem>
  </varlistentry>
</variablelist>

The above code produces this LaTeX output:
\begin{description}
\end{description}
in all the architectures except armel, and then xelatex complains about a
missing \item inside the {description} block.

I searched for similar paragraphs in the dbk files and found this:

file jessie/en/installing.dbk

<variablelist>

<!-- The following empty paragraph purpose is to unb0rk
     the build until real material get committed -->

<varlistentry>
<term><!-- Empty Title --></term>
<listitem>
<para>
<!-- Empty Paragraph -->
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>

<!-- new in Stretch-->
<varlistentry>
[...]

I'm attaching a diff for the file
svn.debian.org/svn/ddp/manuals/branches/release-notes/jessie/en/
that adds a similar empty paragraph to fix the issue.

Please merge it if you find it useful, and I'll check the logs of the
subsequent website builds to see if the error dissapear for jessie/en. If yes,
then I would try to produce another patch for the rest of the languages.

Best regards

Laura Arjona Reina
https://wiki.debian.org/LauraArjona



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.9
  APT prefers oldstable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'oldstable-updates'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=es_ES.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=es_ES.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Index: en/whats-new.dbk
===================================================================
--- en/whats-new.dbk	(revisión: 11716)
+++ en/whats-new.dbk	(copia de trabajo)
@@ -107,6 +107,19 @@
 </itemizedlist>
 
 <variablelist>
+
+<!-- The following empty paragraph purpose is to unb0rk
+     the build until real material get committed -->
+
+  <varlistentry>
+   <term><!-- Empty Title --></term>
+   <listitem>
+    <para>
+    <!-- Empty Paragraph -->
+    </para>
+   </listitem>
+  </varlistentry>
+
   <varlistentry arch="armel">
     <term>Support for iop32x was dropped</term>
     <listitem>