Re: Warn about long lines

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Ingo,

On 8/24/22 14:18, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi Alejandro,
>
> Alejandro Colomar wrote on Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 12:31:15AM +0200:
>
> > Would you mind adding a warning about this?
> >
> > I'm currently doing a global fix in the Linux man-pages turning kernel
> > types like __u64 into the standard uint64_t that user-space programmers
> > expect.  Most of these are used within structure definitions, and so
> > they are within .EX/.EE (non-filled).  I fear that I might be making one
> > of those structure definitions go past the right margin, and there are
> > so many, that it's not funny rendering all of them to check; not even
> > only those that I suspect that might; especially, since some may be
> > deeply indented in .RS/.RE blocks that I may not notice (and that
> > happened at least once --in one that I checked, luckily--).
>
> That is an interesting idea.  I certainly see how it could be useful
> for users, without having to run an additional tool or command.
>
> It may not be easy to implement in a useful way, though.

[...]

>    mandoc -T ascii -W all > /dev/null
>
> which i don't really want to recommend.

I wouldn't either.  There should be a consistent way to get the maximum 
number of warnings, and that is already -Tlint.

> For now, i am adding this entry to the mandoc TODO file:
>
>   - warn about output lines exceeding 80 characters
>     Alejandro Colomar Aug 22, 2022
>     not trivial because -T lint does not call any formatter
>     loc ***  exist *  algo **  size **  imp **
>
> No guarantee whether or when it can be done.

Don't worry, I'll use the workaround for now.

> For the time being, i suggest this workaround:
>
>     $ cd /co/linux-man-pages/
>     $ for f in man?/*; do mandoc $f | col -b | grep -E '.{80}' && echo $f; done
>    
> ldap://host.com:6666/o=University%20of%20Michigan,c=US??sub?(cn=Babs%20Jensen)
>    man7/uri.7
>
>    ldap://ldap.itd.umich.edu/o=University%20of%20Michigan,c=US?postalAddress
>    
> ldap://host.com:6666/o=University%20of%20Michigan,c=US??sub?(cn=Babs%20Jensen)
>    man7/url.7
>
>    ldap://ldap.itd.umich.edu/o=University%20of%20Michigan,c=US?postalAddress
>    
> ldap://host.com:6666/o=University%20of%20Michigan,c=US??sub?(cn=Babs%20Jensen)
>    man7/urn.7
>
>    Rule    US      1967    1973    -       Apr    lastSun    2:00w    1:00d    D
>    man8/zic.8

For now, I'll pick Ralph's suggestion, which integrates well with `groff 
-ww -Tascii`, which I'm already running:

I'll change the current:

        $(GROFF) $(GROFFFLAGS) -z $<

Into something like:

        $(GROFF) $(GROFFFLAGS) $< | (! grep '.\{80\}.')


> Don't worry, Thunderbird hates everyone, not you specifically.
> I do wonder why so many use it anyway, though.

I'll also answer your old comment about why I use gmail, if it's so 
horrible (and I agree it is, although still lightyears better than outlook).

I'm very young, and I started using Linux through a gui.  I learnt the 
basic command-line commands I needed for what I wanted (a small program 
implementing a mathematical algorithm, for testing its validity and 
performance), which was basically apt-get, gcc, and make, and eveything 
else I did it through gnome.  I read email through the web browser.

It was only very slowly that I learnt more command line tools until what 
I know now, by self learning (no CS studies), and asking in forums and 
more recently in mailing lists.  Since what I do is programming, I 
learnt programming tools very well, but since I didn't write emails too 
seriously until my first contributions in the linux-man@ mailing list in 
2020, I never took the time to learn email.  And since Thunderbird was 
the closest thing to what I knew (back then only web gmail) that could 
send plain text, I learnt that.  More recently I learnt 
git-send-email(1), since Thunderbird screws my patches.

But I still haven't found the time to learn a replacement.  Also, if I 
start using a command-line-based email client, I'd also like to set up 
my own email server, for which I'd like to set up some "special" things. 
 Specifically, I never liked CAs --not even creating my own CA--, so 
I'd like to set up a server where I can access to IMAP through SSH 
(similar to how git(1) uses a remote).  I didn't research much, but it 
seems like not a standard thing to do.  Doesn't seem impossible, but 
will require some hacking and a lot of time to learn.

I'm decided to change that soon, but don't have a specific value for "soon".

I guess most of you went the other way around when learning: you started 
at a time where computers rarely had guis, so you learnt first the 
commands and only then guis came out, and offered little more than the 
command lines.  It's not how it works today, where young people rarely 
know what a terminal is, or what Unix is, and it's very hard to find a 
good way to learn it.

Cheers,

Alex



--
Alejandro Colomar
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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