Bug#555330: lintian: manpage-has-errors-from-man does not work correctly

[Adam D. Barratt-29]

Adam D. Barratt wrote:

> Michael Meskes wrote:
>> When running under locale C the test does not work correctly:
>>
>> michael@feivel:~$ LANG=C man --warnings -E UTF-8 -l
>> /usr/share/man/man8/acpid.8.gz >/dev/null
>> col: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character
> [...]
>> The reason seems to be that man pipes its output through col when not
>> displaying on a terminal and col setting the local to C which
>> apparently does not mean UTF-8. Therefore the unicode hyphen (e2 80
>> 90) triggers the
>> above mentioned error message in col's file io.
>
> The above usage has, however, previously worked without issues.  col
> was recently upgraded to a new upstream version, which seems to be
> when the issue occurred.
>
> I'll leave this bug filed against Lintian for the moment until the
> situation is clearer; #555331 is a related bug against bsdmainutils.

Yes, I've just noticed who made the most recent bsdmainutils upload; mea
culpa. :-) In any case, I have to admit I'm not sure exactly which part of
the lintian -> man -> col chain is at fault here.

Adam



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[Michael Meskes]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 12:45:38PM -0000, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
> Yes, I've just noticed who made the most recent bsdmainutils upload;
> mea culpa. :-) In any case, I have to admit I'm not sure exactly
> which part of the lintian -> man -> col chain is at fault here.

I think the call in lintian is as it asks man to produce UTF-8 without telling
col to accept UTF-8.

Hmm, which of the bug reports do we use for discussion? :-)

Michael
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[Adam D. Barratt-29]

On Mon, 9 Nov 2009 15:06:35 +0100, Michael Meskes wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 12:45:38PM -0000, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
>> Yes, I've just noticed who made the most recent bsdmainutils upload;
>> mea culpa. :-) In any case, I have to admit I'm not sure exactly
>> which part of the lintian -> man -> col chain is at fault here.
>
> I think the call in lintian is as it asks man to produce UTF-8
> without telling col to accept UTF-8.

You'll have to excuse my ignorance here, but can lintian actually tell col
to do that as part of the man call?

> Hmm, which of the bug reports do we use for discussion? :-)

I have a slight preference for using this report, as we've already started a
discussion here and I automatically get any mail sent to it, but I'm open to
using either.

Cheers,

Adam



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[Michael Meskes]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 02:24:21PM -0000, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
> You'll have to excuse my ignorance here, but can lintian actually
> tell col to do that as part of the man call?

Yes, by using a locale that sets the encoding to UTF-8. But I assume you didn't
mean that but would prefer a command line option. No, there is none.

> I have a slight preference for using this report, as we've already
> started a discussion here and I automatically get any mail sent to
> it, but I'm open to using either.

I'm involved in both anyway. :-)

Michael
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[Adam D. Barratt-29]

Michael Meskes wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 02:24:21PM -0000, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
>> You'll have to excuse my ignorance here, but can lintian actually
>> tell col to do that as part of the man call?
>
> Yes, by using a locale that sets the encoding to UTF-8. But I assume
> you didn't mean that but would prefer a command line option. No,
> there is none.

Yeah, that would be better.  We're intentionally using LANG=C to avoid
localisation issues with the output; obviously we can't assume that random
Lintian users have any of the en_* locales installed so we can't force one
of those either.

Colin Watson added the explicit UTF-8 encoding to avoid recoding localised
manpages to ASCII and producing bogus warnings in the process; as he has
both man-db and lintian hats I'm hoping he might have a cunning idea as to
how to fix this.

Regards,

Adam



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