On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 06:27:36PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2022-05-26T13:13:44+0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Isn't this handled by passing PSPRINT=lpr to configure, as we do in
> > debian/rules? I generally prefer this approach over
> > build-dependencies in cases where the build-dependency would just be
> > for path detection and isn't actually used during the build.
> >
> > The fact that /usr/share/groff/1.22.4/font/devps/DESC ends with "print
> > lpr" suggests that this is working.
>
> You are quite right. I withdraw that suggestion. I guess if someone
> doesn't want a BSD-style print spooler installed but does have an lp(1)
> command and still wants to use 'groff -l', they'll have to edit the DESC
> files for the output devices...which aren't conffiles. Yuck.
>
> Maybe grops(1), grodvi(1), grolbp(1), and grolj4(1) (and gropdf(1)?)
> should grow an option to override the "print" directive in their DESC
> files.
>
> This is probably not urgent. The lack of bug reports from people
> satisfying the demographic sector I characterized above suggests that
> their numbers are few.
Quite ... I expect nowadays people probably just write the output to a
file and print it from there. ("groff -l" is an un-Unix-like
abomination anyway IMO, though you're probably now going to tell me that
it dates back to v7 or something.)
> > Would you like to co-maintain the package? You're already much more
> > active upstream than I am and you've been doing lots of bug
> > maintenance; I'd be happy for you to do that with a maintainer hat.
>
> Thank you for this gracious invitation! I've been looking for a way
> back into measurable Debian development activity. I accept.
Great. The git repository is under the "debian" group so you should
have commit access already, but please add yourself to Uploaders with
whatever address you prefer.
> > (My only conditions are that I'd like to keep using git-dpm for patch
> > maintenance and dgit for uploads.)
>
> Certainly. I have no revolutionary aspirations there. Nor, I'm ashamed
> to admit, a basic level of competence with git-gpm. I seem to remember
> using dgit and git-buildpackage the last time I uploaded a package,
> which was quite some time ago thanks to my upstream slowing WAY down.
https://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-grub-devel/2014-January/013883.html
is an old email of mine that may help with the "basic level of
competence" question. (But I'm certainly happy to deal with the big
merge of 1.23.0 once that happens, since that can be rather more
complicated than day-to-day patch maintenance.)
> I would ask that you to take the decision about the man/mdoc/UTF-8 glyph
> contretemps[1] (which boils down to: patch {man,mdoc}.local or not?); as
> the upstream instigator of the controversial change, I'm afraid I'm
> conflicted out on the issue.
>
> Unless you agree with me but would prefer I wore the blame for it. 3;-)
I'm afraid I'm rather of the opinion that, despite being in generally
good health, I don't expect to live long enough to see all manual page
authors fix their pages, since that didn't happen very consistently with
the more common \- issue; and I like copy and paste of commonplace shell
commands and regular expressions and such to work. As such I'm inclined
to patch {man,mdoc}.local, though I'll probably defer a final decision
on that until we merge 1.23.0.
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
