Dear Debian file maintainer,
the manpage-l10n project[1] maintains a large number of translations of
man pages both from a large variety of sources (including file) as
well for a large variety of target languages.

During their work translators notice different possible issues in the
original (english) man pages. Sometimes this is a straightforward
typo, sometimes a hard to read sentence, sometimes this is a
convention not held up and sometimes we simply do not understand the
original.

We use several distributions as sources and update regularly (at
least every 2 month). This means we are fairly recent (some
distributions like archlinux also update frequently) but might miss
your latest upstream version once in a while, so the error might be
already fixed. We apologize and ask you to close the issue immediately
if this should be the case, but given the huge volume of projects and
the very limited number of volunteers we are not able to double check
each and every issue.

Secondly we translators see the manpages in the neutral po format,
i.e. converted and harmonized, but not the original source (be it man,
groff, xml or other). So we cannot provide a true patch (where
possible), but only an approximation which you need to convert into
your source format.

Finally the issues I'm reporting have accumulated over time and are
not always discovered by me, so sometimes my description of the
problem my be a bit limited - do not hesitate to ask so we can clarify
them.

I'm now reporting the issues for your project. If future reports
should use another channel, please let me know.

[1] https://manpages-l10n-team.pages.debian.net/manpages-l10n/

Man page: file.1
Issue:    file → <.NM>

"E<.Em Note:> This Debian version of file was built without seccomp support, "
"so this option has no effect."

Helge Kreutzmann wrote...
often a bit interesting - we're still human beings after all - but in
general not much more than a bit. So my suggestion, keep this short.

BTS is fine, keep it this way.

This however leaves me in the void. You tagged the report "patch" which
in my opinion is acceptable even if it's just a description of the
proposed change, not something to be fed to patch(1) - however from the
above I cannot see what is supposed to be different.

    Christoph

Hello Christoph,
Am Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 08:29:22AM +0200 schrieb Christoph Biedl:

Acknowledged, however, often I was asked the opposite, to be more
verbose and explaining the background.

The "patch" askes to replace the word "file" with the string "<.NM>".

I assume this was the man page is again consistent, this is why the
respective translator flagged it this way.

If you don't agree, perfectly fine, then I mark this in our sources so
it will not be reported again.

Greetings

         Helge