A. Costa wrote: > On Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:13:19 +0200 > "Michael Kerrisk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>> Hope this helps... >> Yes it does. Thanks for all these patches. I'm not sure what >> Debian prefers, but for me, working upstream, inlined patches, > > That's interesting; as you deduced, the Debian guys seem to prefer the > '-u' attachments. There may be a fix, but it's out of my hands > at the moment. Background: > > I'm not a Debian maintainer, but a few years back I wrote a > Debian-centric script to find and submit typo bugs, the script relies > on the Debian BTS as a "one size fits all" interface with the rest of > upstream. The occasional Debian maintainer has suggested it would be > more efficient to send typo patches directly upstream; but then this > script would have to cope with a plethora of upstream variables, (e.g. > addresses & preferences), instead of one server interface; the Debian > BTS serves as a public storage medium -- other users see the typos, and > these eventually can be data mined (for common typos and useful > patterns). Not a very elegant way of fixing typos -- it's a > client-side kludge that evolved because I lack server access**. > > (**Given server-side capability, many useful things are possible. For > example, upstream (or their Debian package maintainer) could submit > preferences to our hypothetical typo server, and patches emailed > upstream would be converted to one's favorite format.)
Okay. I see your problem. (I wonder, is there any way you could tailor the behavior of your script so that if the man page comes from 2 or 3 of the biggest upstream man-pages packages (I guess that the man-pages package I maintain is the largest), then it has specific behavior for that package? The output of dpkg -S $(man -w <man-page-name>) might be useful here, in order to determine that upstream package. The whole process is unfortunately very clunky for me as the upstream maintainer. I actively track Debian reports downstream and use control mails to update the bug reports. It's a lot of overhead for dealing with simple typos. In my ideal world, for simple typos like this I'd get a two line message (I don't even need a patch), that was effectively: In page xxxx.n s/old/new/ Under the current setup, I suppose I could just reply saying I fixed the bug and not bother with the Debian control messages, but then it leaves a detective job for the downstream maintainer trying to work out whether to tag a bug as fixed-upstream or not. Joey, is there any way to streamline things on the Debian side? Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk maintainer of Linux man pages Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 Want to help with man page maintenance? Grab the latest tarball at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages/ read the HOWTOHELP file and grep the source files for 'FIXME'. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
