Bug#480955: emacs' Man-reference-regexp vs. perl man pages

[Russ Allbery]

Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 03:36:42AM +0800, jidanni at jidanni.org wrote:
>> I was going to send this To: bug-gnu-emacs at gnu.org:
>> !Subject: Man-reference-regexp should recognize perl unnumbered man pages
>> !
>> !I hit r whilst in man mode, and get
>> !  byte-code: There are no references in the current man page
>> !
>> !Yes there are. So you need to lighten up on the Man-reference-regexp.
>> !Or tell the perl guys to get with the program. (I can't because
>> !apparently I've sent them one bug too many.)
>> !SEE ALSO
>> !       Pod::Simple, Pod::Text::Termcap, pod2text(1)
>
>> So I just don't know what to tell the emacs team a good value that
>> would match.
>> 
>> Man-reference-regexp is a variable defined in `man.el'.
>> Its value is
>> "\\([-a-zA-Z0-9_­+][-a-zA-Z0-9_.:­+]*\\)[ 	]*(\\([0-9][a-zA-Z0-9+]*\\|[LNln]\\))"
>
> If I understand this correctly, [rt.cpan.org #43700] seems
> to be the same issue. Marking as forwarded for now.

The difficulty here is that there is no way to know what section to use.
Some systems use 3, some use 3pm, some use 3pl.  You'd need to somehow
substitute the right section based on local conventions, and there isn't
any mechanism available to do that.

I checked with perl5-porters on this issue and the only opinion
expressed was to close this as wontfix.

(There's also the problem of what to do about the more ambiguous
references, such as "strict" or "xsubpp"; it's impossible in general to
know what section a given reference should go.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>