Re: makemandb errors from pkgsrc

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 05:16:44PM -0600, Dave Huang wrote:
> It seems like regardless of whether NetBSD fixes the manpages in pkgsrc,
> Julio Merino's original comment of "why should I, as an admin of a given
> machine, care about them? There is not much I can do about the errors,
> and seeing them in every single daily report is annoying" still applies.
> This particular machine doesn't have anything in /usr/local/man, but
> what if it did happen to have a bad manpage there? /usr/local/man is
> listed in /etc/mk.conf, so I assume makemandb would try to index it
> and complain.

The same argument has been used to complain about compiler warnings.
Guess what -- often enough they point out real issues. The major reason
why so many man page have smaller or bigger markup bugs is that it
always was way too easy to ignore the warnings groff throws. The
messages are parse errors. They signify that the markup or content is
broken in a way that the document isn't indexed. As such it is the
perfect example of what should not be silenced.

Joerg