Re: A harmful example of a code in the tag-page for "manpage-has-errors-from-man"

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Bjarni Ingi Gislason:
> 				7. October 2015
> 
>   The web-page "lintian.debian.org" has a tag-page named
> "manpage-has-errors-from-man".  The shown example to check for errors
> is false and harmful
> 
> LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 MANROFFSEQ='' MANWIDTH=80 \
>             man --warnings -E UTF-8 -l -Tutf8 -Z <file> >/dev/null
> 

Hi Bjarni,

Thanks for your interest in improving Lintian and Free Software.

> 
> 1) the option '--warnings' reports only a default warning, namely "mac"
> 

Indeed, I believe you filed this as #671258 already where Colin Watson
relied why that was the case.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=671258#10

Note that I am willing to accept a patch for documenting in the tag
description how to optionally enable additional warnings.  However, it
should show the command lintian uses by default!


> 2) the option '-Z' prohibits the output of errors.
> 
>   This behaviour is shown by "man" versions 2.6.7.1, 2.7.0.2, and 2.7.3.
> 

I am of the understanding that was a bug in man-db, which was fixed in
2.7.4 (uploaded to Debian yesterday).

>   When was this (harmful) example first published?
> 

The given expression have evolved over time.

If you are interested in the exact time and date, please pull the source
from https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/lintian/lintian.git and use git
blame to find the change set(s) that introduced it.

>   When was it tested for correctness?
> 

Lintian does not check all programs it use for correctness.  Thanks to
the halting problem I can spent almost an infinite amount of time of
testing any given program and you would still be able to find bugs in it.

However, we do have a test case to assert that lintian notices warnings
and emits them as tags.  If you are interested in when that was
introduced (or satisfactory), please use git blame as mentioned above.

>   Where will the cause of this blunder be documented and explained?
> 

I am not convinced that this issue in man-db is severe enough that it
should warrant any notice from the Lintian maintainers.

>   [...]
> 


Thanks,
~Niels