Bug#714599: [transition-check] FTBFS with perl 5.18

[Russ Allbery]

James McCoy <jamessan at debian.org> writes:
> On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 10:50:56AM +0200, Frank Lichtenheld wrote:

>> There was a problem that it failed to build in current Factory due to
>> Perl 5.18. The attached patch was submitted by Asterios Dramis.
>> 
>> The error encountered was:
>> pod2man --utf8 --center=" " --release="Debian Utilities" transition-check.pl > transition-check.1
>> transition-check.pl around line 66: Expected text after =item, not a number
>> POD document had syntax errors at /usr/bin/pod2man line 71.

> This seems like an incorrect error.  Nothing I've read (other than
> this error) indicates that a number needs to be treated specially by
> =item.  podchecker doesn't complain either.

Change in Pod::Simple 3.24 released 2013-02-14 (note, I don't maintain
Pod::Simple; pod2man just uses it):

        Added a warning when "=item" types mismatch within one
        "=over"/"=back" block. Marc Green/Google Summer of Code, with
        assist from RJBS.

I'm still kind of dubious about it, but it fixes various other problems
where Pod::Simple wasn't figuring out the type of =item lists properly,
and I'm relatively doubtful that upstream will revert it.

The solution, if you have a numeric item in a list that's otherwise
supposed to be a description list, is to add Z<> before or after the item
value.  That will force it to be interpreted as a text label without
changing anything else about the formatting.

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