On 12/02/2022 05:57, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
> Dear coreutils maintainer,
> the manpage-l10n project maintains a large number of translations of
> man pages both from a large variety of sources (including coreutils) as
> well for a large variety of target languages.
> 
> During their work translators notice different possible issues in the
> original (english) man pages. Sometimes this is a straightforward
> typo, sometimes a hard to read sentence, sometimes this is a
> convention not held up and sometimes we simply do not understand the
> original.
> 
> We use several distributions as sources and update regularly (at
> least every 2 month). This means we are fairly recent (some
> distributions like archlinux also update frequently) but might miss
> the latest upstream version once in a while, so the error might be
> already fixed. We apologize and ask you to close the issue immediately
> if this should be the case, but given the huge volume of projects and
> the very limited number of volunteers we are not able to double check
> each and every issue.
> 
> Secondly we translators see the manpages in the neutral po format,
> i.e. converted and harmonized, but not the original source (be it man,
> groff, xml or other). So we cannot provide a true patch (where
> possible), but only an approximation which you need to convert into
> your source format.
> 
> Finally the issues I'm reporting have accumulated over time and are
> not always discovered by me, so sometimes my description of the
> problem my be a bit limited - do not hesitate to ask so we can clarify
> them.
> 
> I'm now reporting the errors for your project. If future reports
> should use another channel, please let me know.
> 
> Man page: arch.1
> Issue:    missing markup (B<>)
> 
> "uname(1), uname(2)"

I'm not sure about marking up references like this.
There should be enough context from the reference
for the man page reader to display appropriately.
For e.g. I use vim to display man pages, and references
like this are highlighted, and can be followed.
Also looking at other projects, I don't see explicitly
highlighted referenced man pages.

> Man page: expand.1
> Issue:    Missing full stop
> 
> "use comma separated list of tab positions  The last specified position can"

Already fixed upstream.

> Man page: ls.1
> Issue:    seems to be an unnecessary split of paragraphs; join with next one
> 
> "can be augmented with a B<--sort> option, but any use of B<--sort>=I<\\,none"
> "\\/> (B<-U>) disables grouping"
> --
> Man page: ls.1
> Issue:   seems to be an unnecessary split of paragraphs; join with next one
> 
> msgid "that points to a directory"
> --

Yes good point.
The issue here is those newlines are generated due to inconsistent indentation.
Attached is a patch to ls to make the indentation consistent.

> Man page: ls.1
> Issue 1:  LS_COLORS → B<LS_COLORS>

There are other env vars mentioned.
I'm not sure why this one, or any should be highlighted.

> Issue 2:  dircolors → B<dircolors>(1)

Good point re the (1). Added in second patch.

> Man page: rmdir.1
> Issue:    join this string with the next one "is non-empty"
> 
> "ignore each failure that is solely because a directory"

Added in third patch.
I also noticed an erroneous blank line added in the man page
after the first option. I adjusted the column of the description
to 21 to avoid that, and in a further (4th) patch I adjusted
the description column of --help and --version is all commands
to use column 21 also.

> Man page: test.1
> Issue:    [ →  test
> 
> "Full documentation E<lt>https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/[E<gt>"

This is subtle. The link above (with [) does actually work.
Though I notice it's not highlighted appropriately by gnome-terminal
at least, so would be better to use "test" instead.
This is done in patch 5.

> Man page: unexpand.1
> Issue:    Missing full stop
> 
> "use comma separated list of tab positions  The last specified position can"

Already fixed upstream.

Marking this as done.

cheers,
Pádraig