I maintain a man-page-to-DocBook converter, doclifter. A side effect of this program is that
it serves as a validator for the correctness and portability of the
markup used on Unix manual pages. I test it by running it against all
the manual pages in a full Ubuntu 12.04 with some extras; there are 10800 of these on my development
machine, of which 820 already have DocBook masters. It converts 9242
(92.61%) of the remaining 9980 into valid XML-DocBook.
Most of the remaining 7.39% of errors happen because groff(1)
and its kin have weak-to-nonexistent validity checking. Often,
doclifter fails because of outright errors in macro usage that groff
does not catch. Sometime it fails on constructions that are legal but
perverse. Very occasionally it throws an error because a man page is
correct but has a structure that cannot be translated to DocBook. I
keep a database of patches for such problems, and periodically
try to push fix patches out to the manual-page maintainers.
Even if you do not care about DocBook, this cleanup work benefits
all third-party manual page viewers, including the GNOME and KDE
documentation browsers; groff constructions that confuse doclifter
are very likely to produce visible problems on these.
The table below is a listing of the 722 (7.23%) pages on which
doclifter fails, but the failure can be prevented with a fix patch to
the manual page source. 16 pages (0.16%) remain intractable,
generally due to markup problems more severe than a point patch can
address. I am working with the individual projects responsible to get
those cleaned up.
It is likely that you are reading this because you have received
email telling you that patches are associated with your name or list
address. Please consider incorporating them, or equivalents, in your
next release. Also, please write back and tell me what you plan to do
so I can keep my database up-to-date.
If you are not already considering it, please think about moving
the documentation masters of your project to DocBook (or some format
from which you can generate DocBook). If everybody moved to using
DocBook as a common exchange format, it would become much easier to
support unified browsing of all system documentation with Web-like
hypertext capabilities, automatic indexing, and rich search
facilities.
Tools to generate man pages, HTML, and PostScript from DocBook
files are open-source and generally available. My program, doclifter,
should make moving your manual-page masters to DocBook a fairly
painless process.
Many major open source projects (including the Linux kernel, the
Linux Documentation Project, X.org, GNOME, KDE, and FreeBSD) have
already moved to DocBook or are in the process of doing so.
Summary: 701 patches pending, 320 accepted, 0 rejected.
Status codes are as follows:
| n |
No response yet. |
| p |
Maintainer has informed me that this is fixed in the masters, but
I have not seen the fix yet. |
| y |
Accepted |
| r |
Rejected |
| [0-9]+ |
number of mailings sent |
| b |
Address is blocked |
Problem codes are explained after the table.
Error codes:
- 0
- This page wins an award for exceptionally creative and perverse
abuse of list syntax.
- 1
- The program you're using to generate a man page from XML is buggy.
One symptom is that it generates .PP tags with no following LP.
- 2
- Use of man or mandoc lists to simulate literal displays defeats any
attempy at structural translation.
- 3
- Use of .RS/RE or list markup to produce indentation in examples
and screenshots makes structural translation impossible.
- 4
- \c is an obscure feature; third-party viewers sometimes don't
intepret it. Plain \ is safer.
- 5
- Unbalanced .RS tag.
- 6
- Presentation-level use of nested SS could not be structurally
translated. I changed lower-level instances to .TP.
- 7
- This mail is informational only. These changes have already been
made in the repository.
- 8
- C function syntax has extra paren.
- 9
- I replaced '-->' with a troff right arrow, which doclifter will
translate properly to an XML/HTML arrow glyph.
- A
- Dot or single-quote at start of line turns it into a garbage command.
This is a serious error; some lines of your page get silently lost
when it is formatted.
- B
- Bogus macro definition
- C
- Broken command synopsis syntax. This may mean you're using a
construction in the command synopsis other than the standard
[ ] | { }, or it may mean you have running text in the command synopsis
section (the latter is not technically an error, but it's impossible
to translate into DocBook markup), or it may mean the command
syntax fails to match the description.
- D
- Non-break space prevents doclifter from incorrectly interpreting
"Feature Test" as end of function synopsis.
- E
- My translator trips over a useless command in list markup.
- F
- Non-English-language page incorrectly installed.
- G
- The extended macros from the *roff pages screw up third-party readers
like Xman and the KDE help browser as well as doclifter.
- H
- Renaming SYNOPSIS because either (a) third-party viewers and
translators will try to interpret it as a command synopsis and become
confused, or (b) it actually needs to be named "SYNOPSIS" with no
parsing for function protoypes to be properly recognized.
- I
- Use of low-level troff hackery to set special indents or breaks can't
be translated. The page will have rendering faults in HTML, and
probably also under third-party man page browsers such as Xman,
Rosetta, and the KDE help browser. This patch eliminates .br, .ta, .ti,
.ce, .in, and \h in favor of requests like .RS/.RE that have
structural translations.
- J
- Ambiguous or invalid backslash. This doesn't cause groff a problem.
but it confuses doclifter and may confuse older troff implementations.
- K
- RCS keyword debris needs to be removed.
- L
- List syntax error. This means .IP, .TP or .RS/.RE markup is garbled.
Common causes include .TP just before a section header, .TP entries
with tags but no bodies, and mandoc lists with no trailing .El.
These confuse doclifter, and may also mess up stricter man-page
browsers like Xman and Rosetta.
- M
- Feature test macros (running text) included in a function
synopsis prevents translation to DocBook.
- N
- Extraneous . at start of line.
- O
- Wrong order of arguments in .Dd macro.
- P
- Removed unused ds to suppress a doclifter warning.
- Q
- Spelling error or typo.
- R
- .ce markup can't be structually translated, and is likely
to cause rendering flaws in generated HTML.
- S
- DEPRECATED: in function syntax cannot be translated. Also, the
code and examples need to be marked up better.
- T
- Junk at the beginning of the manual page.
- U
- Unbalanced group in command synopis. You probably forgot
to open or close a [ ] or { } group properly.
- V
- Missing body content in list trips up doclifter and is likely to
cause rendering problems in other viewers. I have been able to fill
in what was missing except for what should be under TAR_LONGLINK_100.
- W
- Missing or garbled name section. The most common form of garbling
is a missing - or extra -. Or your manual page may have been generated
by a tool that doesn't emit a NAME section as it should. Or your page
may add running text such as a version or authorship banner. These
problems make it impossible to lift the page to DocBook. They
can also confuse third-party manpage browsers and some implementations
of man -k.
- X
- Unknown or invalid macro. That is, one that does not fit in the
macro set that the man page seems to be using. This is a serious
error; it often means part of your text is being lost or rendered
incorrectly.
- Y
- I have been unable to identify an upstream maintainer for this
Ubuntu/Debian package, and am notifying the generic "Maintainer"
address in the package. Please forward appropriately. Also
fix the package metadata so it identifies the upstream maintainers.
- Z
- Your Synopsis is exceptionally creative. Unfortunately, that means
it cannot be translated to structural markup even when things like
running-text inclusions have been moved elswhere.
- a
- ".fi" request was omitted or typoed as ".if".
- b
- Attempt to interpolate unknown string.
- c
- The composer of this man page misunderstood and seriously overused
the \c macro. Some uses were broken; others (notably the sequence
"\\c\n\\&") are bad style.
- d
- Huge and unused macro preamble triggered spurious warnings.
- e
- Macro definitions in the NAME section comfuse doclifter and are
likely to screw up third-party man viewers with their own parsers.
- f
- Replacing .in pairs with .RS/.RE makes translation to structural
markup possible.
- g
- Use of a double quote for inch measurements often confuses people
who aren't from the Anglosphere.
- h
- Unnecessary and unused .ta call may cause converters to error out.
- i
- Non-ASCII character is document synopsis can't be parsed.
- j
- Parenthesized comments in command synopsis. This is impossible
to translate to DocBook.
- k
- kdemangen.pl stuttered two copies of a page. Also, .SS markup
is garbled.
- l
- Incorrect formation of plural - beware the exiguous apostrophe!
- m
- Contains a request or escape that is outside the portable subset that
can be rendered by non-groff viewers such as the KDE and GNOME help
browsers.
- n
- Invalid Sx reference - not a section on this page.
- o
- TBL markup not used where it should be. Tables stitched together
with .ta or list requests can't be lifted to DocBook and will often
choke third-party viewers such as TKMan, XMan, Rosetta, etc.
- p
- Synopsis was incomplete and somewhat garbled.
- q
- Unused macro causes parsing problems.
- r
- I supplied a missing mail addess. Without it, the .TP at the end of the
authors list was ill-formed.
- s
- Changed page to use the .URL macro now preferred on man(7).
- t
- .Id macro that would define Dt is never called.
- u
- Use local definitions of .EX/.EE or .DS/.DE to avoid low-level troff
requests in the page body. There are plans to add these to groff man;
in the interim, this patch adds a compatible definition to your page.
- v
- Missing DESCRIPTION section.
- w
- .SS markup in name section seriously confuses parsing, and sections
don't follow standard naming conventions.
- x
- Syntax had to be arranged because of an options callout.
This is still excessively complicated; third-party man-page
viewers are likely to choke on it.
- y
- I realize this man page is generated from POD or HTML sources. Please
fix the upstream markup so that it generates a well-formed manual
page with the indicated corrections.
- z
- Garbled or missing text near .SS tags. It's not clear to me what's
going on here, but .SS tags on adjacent lines defeat any attempt
to parse the markup. I have inserted text lines indicating that
something needs to be written here.