Unknown macros in manpages

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Feb-2008, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

| Well, this is more a mercurial test than really a bug report.  The bug is
| minor and the proposed fix is trivial.  I am actually interested to know
| whether I am using hg correctly and whether this way of submitting patches
| would be acceptable.

Yes.  I imported it in my archive.

Having patches sent this way seems to work much better than dealing
with raw patches.  For one thing, hg should always generate a diff
that will apply (though perhaps with some conflicts) so I shouldn't
need to try to figure out what -pN options to give to patch, possibly
multiple times to deal with sets of diffs generated in multiple
subdirectories instead of from the top level.

Once I get a patch like this by email, all I have to do is decode the
MIME attachment in Emacs (I'm using VM; it helps if the attachment is
text/plain ASCII), set the region, then run something like

  M-| cd ~/src/octave ; hg import -

then deal with any conflicts, then commit and publish the changeset to
my public archive.

Note that so far, we have only been including a single-line summary of
the patch in the commit message.  You can write more, but I don't
think it is necessary.  If there is some tricky thing in the code that
needs to be explained, I think it is better to have that information
in comments in the code itself rather than in the commit message.

Thanks,

jwe