Re: [PATCH] drop spurious t comment header

[Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1540 bytes --]

Hi Jakub,

On 8/19/22 22:21, Jakub Wilk wrote:
> * Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>, 2020-07-24 12:13:
>> For 15 years or at least, I've not paid any attention to adding the 
>> 't' comments when I added tables to pages, and I do recall anyone 
>> reporting ill effects. So, I'm inclined to apply Mike's patch, but 
>> will hold off a moment, in case there's other feedback.
> 
> I'm a bit late, but...
> 
> Lintian, the Debian package checker, sets the MANROFFSEQ environment 
> variable to empty string as a speed optimization. This turns off loading 
> preprocessors that weren't explicitly declared in the source. The lack 
> of '\" comments can cause false positives (and maybe also false 
> negatives?) in Lintian.
> 
> The use of $MANROFFSEQ for Lintian was proposed here: 
> https://bugs.debian.org/677874
> 
> Beware that the man(1) man page does not correctly explain what 
> $MANROFFSEQ does: https://bugs.debian.org/971009

If we can have a test that makes sure the comment is accurate, I 
wouldn't mind reintroducing it.  If you would like to add a lint-* 
target that tests pages to check that they have the comment iff they 
need it, I'll accept it.

I guess that may be asking too much work.  Maybe showing how to reliably 
test it for a page would be enough (I could transform it into a Makefile 
test).  I can think of a small sh(1) script that could do it, but is 
there any tool that already does it?

Cheers,

Alex
-- 
Alejandro Colomar
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --]