On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 10:06:56AM +0100, Josip Rodin wrote: > On Sat, Dec 06, 2008 at 11:54:36PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > > I really can't see any obvious way to fix this. I don't think it's good > > to leave temporary file litter lying around, > > But it's in the /tmp directory. Nobody else really cares if temporary files > are left lying around in it, and that's okay - for users, it's much better > to have a few extra files lying around until their next reboot than to have > obvious bugs in output.
I understand that as a distribution we don't necessarily care very much about programs that don't clean up temporary files (at least not enough to mandate by policy that they should be fixed). However, as the maintainer of a program that creates temporary files I do care about cleaning them up and regard it as a quality issue. > > I'm afraid I don't see a sensible way for man to do anything about this, > > short perhaps of an environment variable that would let you stop it > > deleting temporary files, but then the user would have to clean those up > > by hand which isn't very appealing either. > > An environment variable would work, or even better a command-line option to > be used together with -H. I don't like requiring manual cleanup even if it is explicitly requested (since such an option would be something I'd expect a number of users to put in $MANOPT). On reflection, maybe having such an option to control generation of data:<base64> URIs for images as suggested by LI Daobing would be better. > > > The -H mode gets groff/troff/whatever to generate images for all the > > > tables, and then that uses psselect from the psutils package and some > > > pnm utilities from the netpbm package. Those missing dependencies could > > > go into the Suggests: field. > > > > They're already in groff's Recommends field, which is the proper place. > > I don't think having man-db suggest them would add anything much. > > Since Recommends are handled in a less lax manner these days, that's okay, > but the relation between man-db and those packages isn't actually via > Recommends. man-db has a Depends on groff-base, which doesn't mention netpbm > or psutils, and it has a Suggests on groff. Sure, but if groff isn't installed then you won't get HTML output at all so the question is moot. man-db does not use netpbm or psutils directly, but only via groff, so declaring a direct relationship would be inappropriate (essentially, the use of those packages is an internal implementation detail of groff that man-db has no business knowing about). -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
