Subject: bug#30471: sed: help2man: Very old version is used

From: Assaf Gordon <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2018 18:50:57 -0600

Hello,

On 15/02/18 12:06 PM, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote:
>    The version of "help2man" is 1.28 from year 2002.
> The current version is  1.47.5 from year 2017
> 
>    An update is due for a long time.

Thank you for the report (and sorry for the very late reply).

The attached patch upgrades to the latest help2man (version 1.47.7, 
released on September 2018).

Jim (and others):
For small questions about changes between the (very old) version 1.28 in
sed's git and version 1.47.7 from ftp.gnu.org:

1.
The copyright years changed:
===
-# Copyright (C) 1997-2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+# Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009,
+# 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 Free Software 
Foundation, Inc.
===
Should this be changed?

2.
The shebang line changed like so:
===
-#!/usr/bin/env perl
+#!/usr/bin/perl -w
===
Should this be reverted? do we prefer "/usr/bin/env perl" ?
Debian's policy prefers "/usr/bin/perl" [1]
which I guess is why the script use it.
[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-files.html#scripts

3.
The perl modules changed like so:
===
+use Text::ParseWords qw(shellwords);
+use Locale::gettext qw(gettext);
+use Encode qw(decode encode);
+use I18N::Langinfo qw(langinfo CODESET);
===

On OpenBSD, Alpine-Linux, CentOS7 the module "Locale/gettext.pm" is missing.
This does not affect building from tarball, as the pre-built "sed.1"
is packaged in the tar file.
It is only needed when building from git.

Is this a show-stopper?

regards,
  - assaf