Bug#848818: xterm: ctlseqs.txt is not rebuilt from ctlseq.ms
On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 9:26 AM, Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com> wrote:
> severity 848818 wishlist
> close 848818
>
> I'm not going to discuss this further -
>
> https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities
> http://invisible-island.net/personal/changelogs.html#problem_hostile
It's been a while since I've had one of these arguments, but reviewing
Policy 2.1 I agree.
Failure to generate ctlseqs.* from ctlseqs.ms would be a GPL violation
and thus a "serious" bug if:
1. The document were under the GPL; and
2. Debian didn't make the ctlseqs.ms and the requisite tools for
generating its dervative forms available.
...but neither of those prerequisites is the case.
That said, I think it would be _nice_ if a package produced all its
generated forms of documentation from their source forms as part of
the build process, and declared Build-Depends appropriately. This acts
as a form of QA on documentation generation tool chains, which in my
experience (in the case of XML/XSL) is as robust as a football pitch
of egg shells.
Thank God you've stuck with *roff. James Clark did such good work on
GNU Roff. Something terrible happened to him.
Regards,
Branden
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