Hi,

When rst2man has no information to generate the 5th field to the
.TH macro (the one that sets the title line, i.e., the header and
footer of the manual page), it generates it as an empty argument,
that is "".  groff(1) and mandoc(1) have good defaults for the 5th
field of .TH when it is not specified, so that most manual pages
should need to specify it, but to use that default, the field has
to be missing, and an empty argument is an existing argument.
I'll show an example, which may be more explicative:

$ cat th1.man
.TH title 7 1234-04-05 foo-1.0 fifth
$ man -P cat ./th1.man
title(7)                      fifth                     title(7)

foo‐1.0                    1234‐04‐05                   title(7)


$ cat th2.man
.TH title 7 1234-04-05 foo-1.0 ""
$ man -P cat ./th2.man
title(7)                                                title(7)

foo‐1.0                    1234‐04‐05                   title(7)


$ cat th3.man
.TH title 7 1234-04-05 foo-1.0
$ man -P cat ./th3.man
title(7)        Miscellaneous Information Manual        title(7)

foo‐1.0                    1234‐04‐05                   title(7)


So, please remove that "" and just use 4 fields if there's no
information for filling it.

Cheers,

Alex

s/should/shouldn't/

Hi Alejandro!

Regarding this bug, upstream wants to know [1] whether omitting the 5th
argument will work with all troff/manpage writers.

I believe it is the case, but can you confirm?

[1]: https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/bugs/458/#b7b6

Hi Dmitry,

AFAIK, it will work.  The behavior may differ, in that groff(1) and
mandoc(1) produce a default text, while others may not produce any text
at all, but it should work.

Cheers,

Alex

Hello,

Bug #1018737 in python-docutils reported by you has been fixed in the
Git repository and is awaiting an upload. You can see the commit
message below and you can check the diff of the fix at:

https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/python-docutils/-/commit/a32c18d5c5a07610d3c04fbe29cf831f59c006c4
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Backport upstream patch to not pass empty "manual" argument to the .TH macro.

Closes: #1018737.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

(this message was generated automatically)
-- 
Greetings

https://bugs.debian.org/1018737

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
python-docutils, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 1018737@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Dmitry Shachnev <mitya57@debian.org> (supplier of updated python-docutils package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:08:40 +0400
Source: python-docutils
Architecture: source
Version: 0.19+dfsg-3
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Debian Python Team <team+python@tracker.debian.org>
Changed-By: Dmitry Shachnev <mitya57@debian.org>
Closes: 1018737 1028478
Changes:
 python-docutils (0.19+dfsg-3) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * Ignore DeprecationWarnings when running test_buildhtml.py
     (closes: #1028478).
   * Abort the build when getting --help of some command fails.
   * Add a patch to fix FileNotFoundError when generating manpages.
   * Break python3-m2r < 0.3 (see #1026288).
   * Break ruby-github-markup < 1.7.0+dfsg-5 (see #1013383).
   * Backport upstream patch to not pass empty "manual" argument to the .TH
     macro (closes: #1018737).
   * Bump Standards-Version to 4.6.2, no changes needed.
   * Upload to unstable.
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