Re: Errors in man pages

[Helge Kreutzmann]

Hello Gavin,
On Fri, Oct 09, 2020 at 05:02:01PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 09, 2020 at 05:46:25PM +0200, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
> > Finally the issues I'm reporting have accumulated over time and are
> > not always discovered by me, so sometimes my description of the
> > problem my be a bit limited - do not hesitate to ask so we can clarify
> > them.
> 
> I appreciate you taking the effort to pass these issues on.
> 
> The issues you are reporting all appear to involve wrapping text
> with "I<" and ">".  I do not know what this does but assume that it is
> changing the font used or marking that text as having a particular
> purpose.  It is not possible to add markup to this text as the man

Yes, and this is helpful both to the reader and to the translator to
distinguish text to be taken verbatim and variables, whose name may
change (and can be translated).

> pages are automatically generated by the help2man program from the
> --help output of the programs in question, and man page markup would
> be inappropriate for such output.  We do not maintain man pages separately,
> due to this being extra work.

I see, I wasn't aware of this.

> If we were to make these changes it would require filtering either the
> output from or the input to the help2man program, and integrating this
> with the package build system.  This is not a priority for me, but I'd
> be open to somebody else doing the work for it.

I'll note this down in our version. If it should change at any (later)
time then fine, else we know the situation and won't report this
anymore in the future.

Thanks for your swift reply and explanation.

Greetings

          Helge

-- 
      Dr. Helge Kreutzmann                     debian@helgefjell.de
           Dipl.-Phys.                   http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
        64bit GNU powered                     gpg signed mail preferred
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