Errors in man pages, here: wprintf(3): Wording

* Errors in man pages, here: wprintf(3): Wording
@ 2020-04-19  6:48 Helge Kreutzmann
  2020-04-20  9:44 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 4+ messages in thread
From: Helge Kreutzmann @ 2020-04-19  6:48 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: mtk.manpages; +Cc: linux-man

Dear manpages maintainers.
the manpage-l10n project maintains a large number of translations of
man pages both from a large variety of sources (including manpages) as
well for a large variety of target languages.

During their work translators notice different possible issues in the
original (english) man pages. Sometiems 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 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 translate 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. As requested, each
issue is sent in an unique mail for easier tracking on your side. If
future reports should use another channel, please let me know.

**

The text in the bracket in the 2nd sentence is difficult to understand

"If no B<l> modifier is present: the I<const\\ char\\ *> argument is expected "
"to be a pointer to an array of character type (pointer to a string) "
"containing a multibyte character sequence beginning in the initial shift "
"state.  Characters from the array are converted to wide characters (each by "
"a call to the B<mbrtowc>(3)  function with a conversion state starting in "
"the initial state before the first byte).  The resulting wide characters are "
"written up to (but not including) the terminating null wide character (L\\(aq"
"\\e0\\(aq).  If a precision is specified, no more wide characters than the "
"number specified are written.  Note that the precision determines the number "
"of I<wide characters> written, not the number of I<bytes> or I<screen "
"positions>.  The array must contain a terminating null byte (\\(aq"
"\\e0\\(aq), unless a precision is given and it is so small that the number "
"of converted wide characters reaches it before the end of the array is "
"reached.  If an B<l> modifier is present: the I<const\\ wchar_t\\ *> "
"argument is expected to be a pointer to an array of wide characters.  Wide "
"characters from the array are written up to (but not including) a "
"terminating null wide character.  If a precision is specified, no more than "
"the number specified are written.  The array must contain a terminating null "
"wide character, unless a precision is given and it is smaller than or equal "
"to the number of wide characters in the array."

-- 
      Dr. Helge Kreutzmann                     debian@helgefjell.de
           Dipl.-Phys.                   http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
        64bit GNU powered                     gpg signed mail preferred
           Help keep free software libre: http://www.ffii.de/

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