#971009 man-db: bad documentation for $MANROFFSEQ

Package:
man-db
Source:
man-db
Description:
tools for reading manual pages
Submitter:
Jakub Wilk
Date:
2022-01-11 11:54:03 UTC
Severity:
normal
#971009#3
Date:
2020-09-26 07:33:20 UTC
From:
To:
The man(1) man page reads: "Firstly, the command line option -p or the
environment variable $MANROFFSEQ is interrogated. If -p was not used and
the environment variable was not set, the initial line of the nroff file
is parsed for a preprocessor string."

This seems to imply that $MANROFFSEQ takes precedence over '\"
declarations; but AFAICT it's the other way round.
#971009#8
Date:
2022-01-09 01:00:51 UTC
From:
To:
MANROFFSEQ predates me, and is something I've never personally found it
convenient to use.  However, on the assumption that it's useful to
somebody, its current precedence seems very weird.  My normal preference
would be to have the following priority, from highest to lowest:

 * command-line option
 * environment variable
 * filesystem state

This is because command-line options are explicit rather than ambient,
and environment variables are usually more easily changed than
filesystem state.

What would you think about changing the implementation rather than the
documentation?
#971009#11
Date:
2022-01-11 11:50:37 UTC
From:
To:
* Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>, 2022-01-09, 01:00:

Agreed it's weird.

This looks sensible in principle.

But beware that Lintian currently sets MANROFFSEQ to empty string in
order to speed up man page checks (see bug #677874). It would be
desirable not to break it.