Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 136959
netpbm - manpages in a wrong format
Last modified: 2013-07-02 19:03:08 EDT
Description of problem: It looks like that "manpages" for netpbm-progs are already in a "preformatted text form". file -z $( rpm -qd netpbm-progs ) prints "ASCII English text" for nearly all of these. 'man' is later doing a fine mess on a display from that. Results of things like 'man -t jpegtopnm' are also not that exciting. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): netpbm-10.25-2
Yes, this is known issue as the upstream version of man pages is available only in HTML form. For explanation see the snippet from http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/ : ----- snip The source code packages do not contain documentation. The documentation is online, and if you want a local copy, you download it from that webserver. Instructions for doing that download, and installing the documentation on your system, are in the source code package in the doc/USERDOC file. note: If you're wondering why the documentation isn't simply included in the source tarballs: It's because the Netpbm maintainer is lazy and doesn't want to make multiple copies of things. ----- snip I see no positive solution to that because the upstream maintainer decided to have all man pages in pure ASCII format. I think that downgrade to old pages doesn't make sense because their content is significantly different from ordinary man pages present in netpbm-9.24. From a maintainer's point of view it's good to have all the doc stuff in one place. OTOH the only solution for that is to use texinfo to keep documentation in one place and let other formats like man pages, HTML, etc. be generated correctly from it. (I mean man pages with links to other netpbm programs, etc.) Maybe it is a good thing to suggest to Bryan, the netpbm upstream maintainer. Unfortunately I have to keep our version of netpbm in sync with upstream so I'll contact Bryan about this and I close this as WONTFIX now. cheers, Jindrich
In doc/USERDOC from netpbm sources one can also find this ----- snip 1) convert the HTML to troff with the 'makeman' program in the 'buildtools' directory of the Netpbm source tree. This is a Python program. ----- snip and later on ----- snip Here is an example of making troff pages: mkdir netpbmdoc cd netpbmdoc wget --recursive --relative http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ cd netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc PATH="/usr/src/netpbm/buildtools/:$PATH" make -f /usr/src/netpbm/buildtools/Makefile.manpage manpages make -f /usr/src/netpbm/buildtools/Makefile.manpage installman cd ../../.. rm -r netpbmdoc man ppmtogif ----- snip "cat" pages are made in a slightly different way shown in another example. I have to admit that I did not try that so far. Are you saying that this is incorrect?
Created attachment 105709 [details] tar.gz archive with nroff format manpages for the current netpbm Out of a sheer curiosity I followed steps outlined in USERDOC file, as quoted in the previous comment and with obvious modifications, and in a short time I ended up with 310 manpages in troff format. Archived results are attached. They display like they should and 'man -t' also does not have problems.
Argh, I missed that part in USERDOC. Thanks for the man pages. I'll build netpbm with new man pages today.
The new man pages are now included in netpbm-10.25-3. Thanks!
Thanks! Just for the record and in an interest of clarity. This is really a script, executed in 'doc' subdiretcory of a build tree, which I used to produce these pages: #!/bin/bash BT=$( dirname ${PWD})"/buildtools" mkdir netpbmdoc cd netpbmdoc wget --recursive --relative http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ cd netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc cp -al ${BT}/makeman . make -f ${BT}/Makefile.manpage manpages mkdir -p ../troffdoc/man1 && mv *.1 ../troffdoc/man1 mkdir -p ../troffdoc/man3 && mv *.3 ../troffdoc/man3 mkdir -p ../troffdoc/man5 && mv *.5 ../troffdoc/man5 The one from USERDOC likely assumes some older version of makefiles or something of that sort. 'wget' every time is clearly not required. :-)