Subject: Re: bug#19228: Challenging output from "help2man split"

From: Pádraig Brady <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 17:33:41 +0000

On 30/11/14 17:06, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> This is sent to the bug addresses for both help2man and split because I'm not sure where the fault lies.  Both are GNU projects, so I hope you can cooperate and figure it out.
> 
> In any event, the output of "help2man split" loses some line breaks and makes an itemized list somewhat hard to understand.  This is the portion that begins "CHUNKS may be:"
> 
> I'm an Xubuntu user, and this output is the man page we get.  I expect the same is true of some or all debian-based distros, and perhaps others as well.

Yes we should improve this. with the following simple patch
we get better output in the man page, though there are
extraneous newlines then. I'll look at improving further.

thanks,
Pádraig.

diff --git a/src/split.c b/src/split.c
index 0eec3ec..0057267 100644
--- a/src/split.c
+++ b/src/split.c
@@ -234,12 +234,12 @@ is -, read standard input.\n\
       emit_size_note ();
       fputs (_("\n\
 CHUNKS may be:\n\
-N       split into N files based on size of input\n\
-K/N     output Kth of N to stdout\n\
-l/N     split into N files without splitting lines\n\
-l/K/N   output Kth of N to stdout without splitting lines\n\
-r/N     like 'l' but use round robin distribution\n\
-r/K/N   likewise but only output Kth of N to stdout\n\
+ N       split into N files based on size of input\n\
+ K/N     output Kth of N to stdout\n\
+ l/N     split into N files without splitting lines\n\
+ l/K/N   output Kth of N to stdout without splitting lines\n\
+ r/N     like 'l' but use round robin distribution\n\
+ r/K/N   likewise but only output Kth of N to stdout\n\
 "), stdout);
       emit_ancillary_info (PROGRAM_NAME);
     }