[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#968972: volpack: Manual pages are formatted incorrectly

[Felix Lechner]

Package: libvolpack1-dev
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-CC: Stuart Prescott <stuart at debian.org>

Hi,

Many of the manual pages in your package appear to be formatted
incorrectly. In a recent Lintian run across the archive, they
generated many errors like this:

Warning in group volpack/1.0b3-8: Non-zero status 3 from man
--warnings -E UTF-8 -l -Tutf8 -Z
/tmp/lintian-pool-aeCkRt5q0G/v/volpack/libvolpack1-dev_1.0b3-8_amd64_binary/unpack
ed/usr/share/man/man3/BruteForce.3.gz:
man: ignoring unknown preprocessor `C'
man: ignoring unknown preprocessor `o'
man: ignoring unknown preprocessor `y'
man: ignoring unknown preprocessor `i'
man: ignoring unknown preprocessor `h'
man: can't execute grap: No such file or directory
refer:0BU:70: fatal error: output error
man: command exited with status 127: /usr/lib/man-db/zsoelim |
/usr/lib/man-db/manconv -f UTF-8:ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8//IGNORE | preconv
-e UTF-8 | pic -S | refer | grap | tbl | g
roff -mandoc -Z -wmac -Tutf8

A full log with all errors is attached to this message.

The errors seem to be caused by the copyright notice:

\" Copyright (c) 1994 The Board of Trustees of The Leland Stanford
'\" Junior University.  All rights reserved.
'\"
'\" Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and its
'\" documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided
'\" that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in
'\" all copies of this software and that you do not sell the software.
'\" Commercial licensing is available by contacting the author.
'\"
'\" THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
'\" EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY
'\" WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
'\"
'\" Author:
'\"    Phil Lacroute
'\"    Computer Systems Laboratory
'\"    Electrical Engineering Dept.
'\"    Stanford University
'\"
'\" $Date: 1994/12/31 19:49:53 $
'\" $Revision: 1.1 $
'\"
'\" Macros
'\" .FS <type>  --  function start
'\"     <type> is return type of function
'\"     name and arguments follow on next line

Perhaps the '\" should be .\" ? This transformation via sed seems to fix it:

    sed "s@'\\\\@.\\\\@"

You can use the same command as Lintian to check the result:

    man --warnings -E UTF-8 -l -Tutf8 [-Z if compressed] [filename]

Thanks to Stuart Prescott for figuring it all out!

Kind regards
Felix Lechner
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