[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#333993: 'man faillog' typo: "occured"

[A. Costa]

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 02:07:55 +0200
Nicolas François <nicolas.francois at centraliens.net> wrote:

> Thanks a lot for the fixes for these three man pages.

Glad to hear they're useful!

> BTW, I alredy noticed that you filled a lot of bug reports to report
> typos in man pages.
> Are you using a tool? 

Yeah, I wrote this typo-finding bug-reporting script tool, but it's not
quite finished or ready for the general public yet**, I'm sort of
testing it out and learning what it needs by trial and error; several
developers have given some good advice about it too.

(**for example, it needs a way to know what typos have already been
reported, otherwise the BTS could be clogged with redundant reports.)

> ...Are you running this tool regularly on all Debian's
> man pages, or on the pages installed on your system?

Only the ones I have installed, and not very systematically at that.

> I would be interrested to run such a tool to check the French man pages.

Maybe this script can be separated into two parts.  The first part would find
stuff and make a patch, and the second part would send in the report.
That first part would be relatively harmless, and should be safe to go
public with.  I've been meaning to put up a web page about this... you'll
be emailed whenever it's up.

Notes on the interface, which goes something like:

	% errman faillog

...then it scans a temporary copy of the 'faillog' man page for
anything 5 or more chars long not in various dictionaries, then it
filters out stuff (URLS, command names) then sorts it, and
pops up a menu:

                    1  FAILLOG << highlighted >>
                    2  occured
                    1  struct

	Suspected unique typos = 3
	pick word to edit #faillog                               1,  0%

...now obviously 'struct' and 'FAILLOG'*** aren't typos, so we move the
arrow to '2 occured', press enter, and it opens an editor at the first
instance of 'occured', line #9 of 'faillog.5.gz'.  (Seeing the whole line
is necessary for context -- some things look like typos but aren't.)

(***in fact, it should filter FAILLOG out... that's a bug -- the filter
only checked for lower case.)

Use the editor's spellchecker to fix it, save the file, then exit the
editor.  Then back to the menu, and 'occured' is still highlighted,
press enter again, and it goes the the 2nd place it appears.  Save,
exit.  After that, pressing enter on 'occured' does nothing, since both
instances were corrected.

There's no more typos, so press 'q', and then the script makes a
patch at '/tmp/faillog.5.gz.diff'.  Note that the original
man page is never edited, just a copy, to create a patch.

And that's the part that's safe.

Then it composes the bug report, lets me edit it if necessary, and
sends it; but I'll skip describing that interface, or its batch mode.

Anyway, it's crude but faster and more fun than the other methods I know
of.  If after reading the above you're still interested in making it
speak French, I'll try to be less lazy about getting it out there.

HTH...