manpage not recognized if doesn't start with ".TH "

[Emilien Klein]

I have a manpage that starts with a "Hey, EMACS:" line [0], which is how the example files is created when following the Debian new maintainer's guide.

distutils-extra considers a file that matched '*.[0123456789]' as a valid man page only if it starts with the string ".TH " [1]. This results in that manpage to not be automatically recognized, and has 2 consequences:

- You need to add a line in MANIFEST.in with "include doc/*"
- The file appears in the list printed after "WARNING: the following files are not recognized by DistUtilsExtra.auto" (even though the file is covered by MANIFEST.in, just reported bug 893335)

Maybe the check to see if the file is a valid manpage should do something like this:
    if line.startswith('.TH ') or line.startswith('.\"'):

[0] bazaar.launchpad.net/~emilien-klein/nautilus-image-manipulator/trunk/view/110/doc/nautilus-image-manipulator.1
[1] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~python-distutils-extra-hackers/python-distutils-extra/debian/view/head:/DistUtilsExtra/auto.py#L304

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

gmanedit also adds a comment at the beginning of man pages, to the same effect.

Apparently they can be moved down the file a line without harm (as a circumvention).

[Dominique Lasserre (lasall)]

Hi the fix in related branch should solve this issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package python-distutils-extra - 2.37-1

---------------
python-distutils-extra (2.37-1) unstable; urgency=low

  [ Martin Pitt ]
  * auto.py: Recognize manpages which have comments before the initial .TH
    comment. Thanks to Dominique Lasserre for the initial patch!
    (LP: #893337)

  [ Andrew Starr-Bochicchio ]
  * debian/local/python-mkdebian: Handle Glade .ui files correctly when
    generating the copyright file. Also ignore backup files.
    (LP: #1025491)

python-distutils-extra (2.36-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * debian/rules: Run tests against all supported python 2 and 3 versions.
    This catches bugs with Python 2.6. (Closes: #684967)
  * debian/rules: Skip tests if $DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS contains "nocheck".
    (Closes: #684966)
  * debian/rules: Run tests under LC_ALL=C, to fix FTBFS in cases where
    LC_CTYPE is set explicitly. Thanks Gregor Hermann!
  * auto.py: Use python 2.6 friendly sys.version_info test. Thanks Salvatore
    Bonaccorso and Gregor Hermann! (First half of #682631)
  * auto.py: Do not call decode() with an "errors" keyword, as this does not
    yet work with Python 2.6. Thanks Gregor Hermann! (Closes: #682631)
 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Mon, 17 Sep 2012 12:47:44 +0200