This source package contains manual pages that are basically equivalent to those in the manpages-posix and manpages-posix-dev packages in upstream/archlinux/man0p, upstream/archlinux/man1p, and upstream/archlinux/man3p. These are taken from POSIX Issue 7 and to make these manual pages available in the first place required special permission from the IEEE and The Open Group to reproduce the standard.

In fact, translating these pages is probably prohibited as a derivative work.

In wondering how this was able to slip through, I noticed that debian/copyright doesn't specify any licensing information for the upstream/ subdirectory which is in this source package. This directory contains a lot of original man pages copied from other distros and I don't see it practical to review them all—are they really a meaningful part of the source for this package?

Hello John,
thanks for your analysis.

I see 3 issues from your report.

1. The source packages contains undistributable man pages.

   Yes, unfortunately archlinux mixes Linux man pages and POSIX man
   pages in one package, hence these pages went in the upstream set.

   To remedy this specific problem, I'll prune those pages from the
   upstream set, make a new upstream bug fix release and a new Debian
   release. This should fix the problem in Unstable.

   For Trixie, I can provide an according backport, as I do regularly.
   However, it needs to be discussed what the best fix would be there.
   My personal preference would be to make an according upload to
   "stable-proposed-updates" or whatever.

2. There are missing licensing information

   So far, our skripts for the Debian package only analyse the files
   actually shipped in the binary package, where you can find a complete
   list in debian/copyright.

   Having done dozens of L10N NMUs I noticed that these lists are
   often not well maintained, especially when looking for translations
   (they are often forgotten). So I don't think this is a serious bug
   (probably important).

   To address these, I would include an upstream infrastructure to
   list the licences of all upstream man pages. But since licensecheck
   does not detect all of them, this cannot happen overnight.

3. These undistributable pages "slipped through"

   As upstream, another script would then (in the future) check if
   there are new man pages introduced and their license would be
   inspected and only shipped upstream if they allow distribution.
   This way, *in the future* no such page could "slip in".

And one question:
[Are] they really a meaningful part of the source for this package?

Yes. To rebuild the translations in a reproducible way you need to
transform the original man pages (from the dates they were pulled form
the various distributions) into template files, which are then synched
with the po files from the translators and transformed into translated
man pages. You can find more about the general worflow in po4a(1).

If I missed something, please let me know.

Greetings

         Helge

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
manpages-l10n, 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 1136135@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Dr. Helge Kreutzmann <debian@helgefjell.de> (supplier of updated manpages-l10n 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: Mon, 11 May 2026 16:51:11 +0200
Source: manpages-l10n
Architecture: source
Version: 4.30.2-1
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Dr. Helge Kreutzmann <debian@helgefjell.de>
Changed-By: Dr. Helge Kreutzmann <debian@helgefjell.de>
Closes: 1136135
Changes:
 manpages-l10n (4.30.2-1) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * New upstream version 4.30.2.
   * This version no longer contains the undistributable upstream man pages.
     Additionally, the licenses of the upstream man pages are now determined.
     This is incomplete yet (covering ~ 48%), but will be expanded over the
     coming time. (Closes: #1136135).
   * Update d/copyright
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