• Bug#1104820: gapplication.1: Some remarks and a patch with editorial ch

    From Simon McVittie@21:1/5 to Bjarni Ingi Gislason on Thu May 15 20:30:01 2025
    Control: tags -1 - patch

    On Tue, 06 May 2025 at 22:10:27 +0000, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote:
    Checking for defects with a new version

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

    You seem to be assuming in this series of bug reports that man all man
    pages are maintained by hand as roff source code. This is not the case.
    The source code for gapplication(1) is docs/reference/gio/gapplication.rst
    in the GLib source tree, written in reStructuredText and converted to
    man page (roff) format by python3-docutils.

    As a result, we are not interested in stylistic points about the roff
    source code or the output of lint tools: nobody is going to be editing the
    roff source code for this man page by hand anyway, so suggestions that
    would make it easier to hand-edit are not a productive use of anyone's
    time. The only issues that are actionable for this particular man page
    are those that genuinely have a user-visible impact to a user reading
    the documentation with `man 1 gapplication` or `apropos gapplication`
    or similar. If there is a user-visible problem with this man page,
    the two possible solutions are:

    1. changing the source code (.rst file) or the options passed to the
    man-page-generating tool, in the glib2.0 source package, preferably
    upstream rather than in Debian;

    2. or changing the tool itself (in the python-docutils source package)
    to produce better output from the same source code, again preferably
    upstream rather than in Debian

    Applying the patch you have provided to a generated file is not a valid medium-term solution: that patch will become inapplicable when either
    the man page or the generating tool changes. So I'm removing the patch
    tag from this bug report. Please do not propose patches against
    generated files, they will not be applied.

    All maintainers (both upstream and in Debian) have limited time and many
    other issues competing for our attention, and reviewing proposed patches
    takes time, so please consider whether the impact of minor or cosmetic
    issues is sufficiently significant that reporting them is a good use of
    limited resources. I expect that you would get a better reception if you limited this series of bug reports by prioritizing only the issues that
    have a user-visible impact, and not requesting cosmetic/trivial changes
    at the same time.

    Thanks,
    smcv

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