* What led up to the situation?

     Checking for defects with a new version

test-[g|n]roff -mandoc -t -K utf8 -rF0 -rHY=0 -rCHECKSTYLE=10 -ww -z < "man page"

  [Use "groff -e ' $' -e '\\~$' <file>" to find obvious trailing spaces.]

  ["test-groff" is a script in the repository for "groff"; is not shipped]
(local copy and "troff" slightly changed by me).

  [The fate of "test-nroff" was decided in groff bug #55941.]

   * What was the outcome of this action?

troff:<stdin>:34: warning: trailing space in the line
troff:<stdin>:36: warning: trailing space in the line

   * What outcome did you expect instead?

     No output (no warnings).

-.-

  General remarks and further material, if a diff-file exist, are in the
attachments.

Hi,

Am Fri, Feb 21, 2025 at 11:14:15PM +0000, schrieb Bjarni Ingi Gislason:

As you(?) noticed later in the diff remarks:

As such, the problems you found would need to be fixed in the man page
generation OR if that stems from misusing the generator somehow a patch
against the input would be nice: (e.g.)
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/apt-cache.8.xml
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/apt-mark.8.xml

You can find the CMake runes that build the man pages via xsltproc
from the previously mentioned xml sources in DocBook format:
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/CMake/Documentation.cmake#L128
(the translated man pages make a detour over po4a first)


As it stands patching a generated build-artifact is not a workable
solution and so I dropped the 'patch' tag as any change in the generator
or the source would potentially break the patch.


Note that we might eventually rework the man pages entirely and in that
process move to a different source format (but it is very unlikely we
will end up writing man pages by hand). That is some big project not
very well suited for close-to-freeze moments like now through and even
after that probably needs a while if ever attempted.

For src:apt there is no difference between "Debian maintainer" and
"upstream" because apt is native to Debian and hence also its upstream,
so what are you actually asking and what would the answer solve?


Best regards

David Kalnischkies