man errors "grotty:...character above first line discarded"

[jidanni]

Yes, one can see the man page, e.g., on Debian, but one also sees:

$ man gmt > /dev/null
grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):6944: character above first line discarded
grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):6948: character above first line discarded
grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):6952: character above first line discarded
grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):34454: character above first line discarded
grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):34458: character above first line discarded
grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):34462: character above first line discarded
grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):34466: character above first line discarded
grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):34470: character above first line discarded
grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):34474: character above first line discarded
$ zcat /usr/share/man/man1/gmt.1.gz | nroff -man > /dev/null
troff: <standard input>:250: warning [p 4, 0.3i]: cannot adjust line
troff: <standard input>:959: warning [p 10, 7.0i, div 'an-div', 0.0i]: cannot adjust line
troff: <standard input>:1078: warning [p 11, 9.3i]: cannot adjust line
troff: <standard input>:1754: warning [p 22, 5.7i]: cannot adjust line
troff: <standard input>:1754: warning [p 22, 5.8i]: can't break line
$ apt-cache policy gmt
gmt:
  Installed: 6.4.0+dfsg-2+b1
  Candidate: 6.4.0+dfsg-2+b1
  Version table:
 *** 6.4.0+dfsg-2+b1 990
        990 http://deb.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[joa-quim]

Anything we can do here with little effort or shell we close it with bad luck, not our fault?

[PaulWessel]

Maybe @seisman knows what is going on? I do use the man command for basic Unix stuff but never for gmt anymore.

[joa-quim]

I think we dropped the gmt man pages long ago. Probably at the time of HTML -> Sphinx transition.

[jidanni]

OK. Filed https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1040347 .

[sebastic]

I think we dropped the gmt man pages long ago. Probably at the time of HTML -> Sphinx transition.

FWIW, the tarballs still contain manpages:

$ tar tavf ../gmt-6.4.0-src.tar.xz | grep man_release
drwxr-xr-x root/wheel        0 2022-06-16 13:32 gmt-6.4.0/man_release/
-rw-r--r-- root/wheel     2687 2022-06-16 13:32 gmt-6.4.0/man_release/gmtswitch.1.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/wheel      709 2022-06-16 13:32 gmt-6.4.0/man_release/isogmt.1.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/wheel     1027 2022-06-16 13:32 gmt-6.4.0/man_release/gmt-config.1.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/wheel    31556 2022-06-16 13:32 gmt-6.4.0/man_release/gmt.1.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/wheel     2528 2022-06-16 13:32 gmt-6.4.0/man_release/gmt_shell_functions.sh.1.gz

These are included in the Debian package.

[jidanni]

OK, I closed the Debian bug.

[joa-quim]

I'm sorry but we do not maintain the man pages anymore. The docs building machinery still creates them but if they are incorrect someone really interested in the subject should solve those issues.