QEMU manpages provoke man(1) "can't break line" warnings

[LPNow]

I noticed when I ran 'man qemu' for version 2.8.0 I am getting this back at the terminal;

<standard input>:1674: warning [p 1, 188.5i, div `an-div', 0.2i]: can't break line
<standard input>:1677: warning [p 1, 188.8i, div `an-div', 0.2i]: can't break line

[Peter Maydell (pmaydell)]

This still reproduces with current QEMU:

$ man -l build/qemu.1 >/dev/null
<standard input>:248: warning [p 3, 6.8i, div `an-div', 0.2i]: can't break line
<standard input>:376: warning [p 5, 2.5i, div `an-div', 0.2i]: can't break line
<standard input>:667: warning [p 8, 9.7i, div `an-div', 0.2i]: can't break line

(and so on for more warnings)

'man' produces these warnings when the input has a line which it is unable to cleanly line-break to fit in the output terminal (and so the number of warnings you get depends on the width of the terminal you're using). For instance this line:
.IP "\fB\-boot [order=\fR\fIdrives\fR\fB][,once=\fR\fIdrives\fR\fB][,menu=on|off][,splash=\fR\fIsp_name\fR\fB][,splash\-time=\fR\fIsp_time\fR\fB][,

has no spaces in the whole of the part after "-boot" so it will typically not line break cleanly.

Ideally we would fix this by arranging to have the groff output include '\:' zero-width break points between the ']' and '[' in this kind of long line so that it knew where to wrap. But I don't know if this is easy/possible with how we're generating the manpages at the moment.

In any case the warning is harmless and the hard-wrapped lines are not too unreadable, so this is a minor issue.

[Peter Maydell (pmaydell)]

Still happens with the new Sphinx-generated manpages, for exactly the same reason.

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

This is an automated cleanup. This bug report has been moved to QEMU's
new bug tracker on gitlab.com and thus gets marked as 'expired' now.
Please continue with the discussion here:

 https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/214