Bug#1018737: /usr/bin/rst2man: rst2man: .TH 5th field shouldn't be empty

[Alejandro Colomar]

Package: python3-docutils
Version: 0.17.1+dfsg-2
Severity: normal
File: /usr/bin/rst2man
Tags: upstream
X-Debbugs-Cc: alx.manpages@gmail.com, groff@gnu.org, Quentin Monnet 
<quentin@isovalent.com>


Hi,

When rst2man has no information to generate the 5th field to the
.TH macro (the one that sets the title line, i.e., the header and
footer of the manual page), it generates it as an empty argument,
that is "".  groff(1) and mandoc(1) have good defaults for the 5th
field of .TH when it is not specified, so that most manual pages
should need to specify it, but to use that default, the field has
to be missing, and an empty argument is an existing argument.
I'll show an example, which may be more explicative:

$ cat th1.man 
.TH title 7 1234-04-05 foo-1.0 fifth
$ man -P cat ./th1.man 
title(7)                      fifth                     title(7)

foo‐1.0                    1234‐04‐05                   title(7)


$ cat th2.man 
.TH title 7 1234-04-05 foo-1.0 ""
$ man -P cat ./th2.man 
title(7)                                                title(7)

foo‐1.0                    1234‐04‐05                   title(7)


$ cat th3.man 
.TH title 7 1234-04-05 foo-1.0
$ man -P cat ./th3.man 
title(7)        Miscellaneous Information Manual        title(7)

foo‐1.0                    1234‐04‐05                   title(7)


So, please remove that "" and just use 4 fields if there's no
information for filling it.

Cheers,

Alex


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.18.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages python3-docutils depends on:
ii  docutils-common  0.17.1+dfsg-2
ii  python3          3.10.6-1
ii  python3-roman    3.3-1

Versions of packages python3-docutils recommends:
ii  libpaper-utils    1.1.28+b1
ii  python3-pil       9.2.0-1+b1
ii  python3-pygments  2.12.0+dfsg-2

Versions of packages python3-docutils suggests:
pn  docutils-doc                                <none>
pn  fonts-linuxlibertine | ttf-linux-libertine  <none>
pn  texlive-lang-french                         <none>
ii  texlive-latex-base                          2022.20220722-1
ii  texlive-latex-recommended                   2022.20220722-1

-- no debconf information