Possible formatting bug in ssh-agent.1 man page

Ingo Schwarze schwarze at usta.de
Thu Sep 29 03:03:27 AEST 2016


Hi,

Mantas Mikul??nas wrote on Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 06:51:18PM +0300:

> At least on Linux systems, wouldn't using man/groff's built-in mdoc
> support also be good enough?

Yes.

Jakub Jelen of Redhat reported that the bug didn't affect Fedora.
I don't know for sure, but i guess that was because they install
mdoc(7) rather than man(7) versions of the manuals.

In any case, installing mdoc(7) versions would seem reasonable to
me on any Linux distribution.


However, i have seen at least one case where a senior developer
of a major Linux distro insisted on installing man(7) rather than
mdoc(7) versions even though the mdoc(7) versions are the master
and the man(7) versions autogenerated from them:  Bdale Garbee
when packaging sudo(8) for Debian.  I don't know why, though;
preferring man(7) doesn't seem to make sense to me.  Also, it
doesn't appear to be a strict policy there; on a Debian system
i have access to, i see many mdoc(7) manuals in /usr/share/man/.


That said, the mdoc2man conversion tool in the OpenSSH build system
ought to be maintained because there are archaic operating systems
out there (for example commercial Solaris 11) that still don't have
mdoc(7) support in man(1) by default.

Yours,
  Ingo


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