#849866 /usr/bin/man: Please avoid breaking lines in SYNOPSIS

Package:
man-db
Source:
man-db
Description:
tools for reading manual pages
Submitter:
"Ph. Marek"
Date:
2022-01-30 14:15:04 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#849866#5
Date:
2017-01-01 18:27:44 UTC
From:
To:
In a terminal with
    # tput cols
    85

I looked at the man page of "sloccount". The result was this (left-shifted to
match the line length limit here):

  SYNOPSIS
    sloccount [--version] [--cached] [--append] [ --datadir directory ] [--fol‐
    low] [--duplicates]  [--crossdups]  [--autogen]  [--multiproject]  [--file‐
    count] [--wide] [--details] [ --effort F E ] [ --schedule F E ] [ --person‐
    cost cost ] [ --overhead overhead ] [ --addlang language ] [ --addlangall ]
    [--] directories

While "--fol-low" is easy to determine as a purely aesthetic dash because of
the line-wrap, the "--file-count" actually got me; I tried the 3-dashes variant
and got "Unknown option".

Please turn this behaviour off, at least in the SYNOPSIS it's not a
good idea IMO.


Thanks a lot!
#849866#10
Date:
2017-01-02 12:21:56 UTC
From:
To:
Hmm.  I agree that this particular case is unfortunate.  But I don't
really want to turn off hyphenation globally, and there's no reasonable
way to disable it just for a single section.  Individual pages can do
this by putting .nh / .hy requests around the region where they want
hyphenation to be disabled, or you can set MANOPT=--no-hyphenation if
you prefer this behaviour across the board.

I'll leave this bug open as I agree that it's not ideal behaviour, but I
have no immediate ideas for solving it without changes that I'd rather
not make.