Ubuntu
foremost package

Documentation needs update

Asked by John Winterton

I've been trying to recover some disks lately and have used both foremost and scalpel to try and recover my data. One of the things that I find annoying in both man pages is that they suggest that octal entries have a range of [0-9][0-9][0-9]. The one in scalpel was clearly copied from the foremost description.

One concludes that neither of these documents were shown to a technical writer since that range for octal numbers is clearly wrong. It should be [0-7][0-7][0-7]. Rather than write separately to both authors, I am simply posting this, and trust that it will be passed along. In general this whole set of documents has been clearly written by programmers and need review, but being a programmer myself, I can live with the rough side of it. However, it is picky stuff like this that causes Linux/UNIX to be regarded as a hacker venue. Inaccuracies in documentation are so important because they can kill a decision to use our system.

This is not a problem for me, and no reply is needed.

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Ubuntu foremost Edit question
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John Winterton
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Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

Log a bug wit your fixes.

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John Winterton (jwinterton) said : 		#2

OK. What subject for the bug should I use? There are three programs involved, but man is only a vehicle.

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mycae (mycae) said : 		#3

Apologies if these instructions are a bit over-the-top.

check out the package using apt source:

apt-get source package

eg:

apt-get source foremost

then use mercurial, git or whatever as your Version controller (instructions here assume mercurial (sudo aptitude install mercurial) )

hg init
hg add
hg commit -m "Initial commit" -u "<email address hidden>"

now, make the changes to the manpage. These will be in the debian/ folder most likely, and will be something like "foremost.1" you can instruct man to open that particular man page as needed to cross-check your formatting.

once done, diff the output to a file

hg diff > my-man-patch

then send it to the maintainer

Gürkan Sengün

you can find his email here:

http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/foremost.html

rinse and repeat for other packages.

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John Winterton (jwinterton) said : 		#4

Far too complicated for an old retired gent. I'll just us apport and report both bugs with the appropriate fix.