Hi Loren,
At 2024-01-30T19:55:07-0800, Loren M. Lang wrote:
> While building a package preparing for a possible upload, I am getting
> a large number of warnings from groff-message due to invalid fonts for
> C and CB in the manpages that are generated from Markdown with pandoc.
> From what I understand, this is a known issue with how pandoc
> generates nroff man pages and more recent versions of groff have
> started complaining about the issue. Here is an example warning I am
> getting:
>
> groff-message troff:<standard input>:89: warning: cannot select font 'C'
>
> And it seems to match the issue documented here:
>
> https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/9020
Yes. I work on groff upstream (and at rare intervals make minor
contributions to the Debian package), and you've accurately summarized
the situation.
> My question is how to handle this. Should I just ignore it for now and
> upload anyways since it's only a warning or should I add an override
> to suppress it as it doesn't seem to be causing any breaking issues at
> the moment? Have other developers dealt with this warning before?
Well, the version of pandoc that resolved the issue was 3.1.7, released
in August 2023.[1] But the version in Debian unstable is still 3.1.3,
and the package is team-maintained.[2]
Unless it's release-critical to have these Lintian warnings, I would
disregard them in hope that the pandoc package in unstable will catch
up at some point soon. Those warnings from groff can arise under other
circumstances, and they do mean that a font change requested by the
document has not been honored,[3] so I do not recommend masking them in
general.
Regards,
Branden
[1] https://pandoc.org/releases.html
[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/pandoc
[3] From technical writing and accessibility perspectives, it is not
wise to stake important semantic differences to changes in font
style, but a lot of documentation gets written with that coupling
nevertheless.
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