Ivan Shmakov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Last week I've reported a bug in ifconfig(8) (as of net-tools
> 1.60-17.) The problem is in that the ifconfig.8 contains the
> following:
> --cut--
> .B ifconfig eth0:0 down
> . Note: for every scope (i.e. same net with address/netmask combination) all
> aliases are deleted, if you delete the first (primary).
> --cut--
> This is (I guess) intended to be rendered by Groff as: ``ifconfig
> ... in the bold face, then period (.), then Note:, ...'' However,
> it renders just as if there were no ``. Note: ...'' line at all.
> I guess, it happens because Groff interprets ``. Note:'' (or
> ``. Note''?) as a ``command'', and since it knows no definition
> for it, it ignores the entire line.
Yeah, this is a common roff coding problem. That text should be written
as:
.BR "ifconfig eth0:0 down" .
Note: ....
or with the period escaped.
In general, I wish that people would stop writing man pages directly in
roff unless they really know roff. Some people do, and that's great, but
most people really don't and it's not a trivial language. It has weird
corner cases and gotchas. I know it well enough to have written various
translators to roff, and I still use POD to write all my man pages and
then convert them because doing it directly in roff is too error-prone.
Those who prefer it can of course use DocBook instead.
> What I'm expected to do, then? (With respect to Debian BTS.) I
> believe, start filing multiple bug reports would be a bad idea
> (for me now.)
Well, they certainly are bugs, and I think filing those bugs after you
verify that this is a problem and the period wasn't there for some other
purpose (such as to create a comment line) is perfectly fine.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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