I wrote a very long time ago:
I've been seeing this since clean installing Fedora 30. I don't recall ever seeing it before, including on a Fedora 29 -> Fedora 30 upgraded system (is now the clean installed system).
[chris@flap ~]$ man rpm | grep -C 10 rpmverbosity <standard input>:176: warning [p 3, 0.8i]: cannot adjust line [chris@flap mantest]$ man rpm >rpm.stdout 2>rpm.stderr [chris@flap mantest]$ ll -rw-rw-r--. 1 chris chris 62 Jul 16 14:24 rpm.stderr -rw-rw-r--. 1 chris chris 28498 Jul 16 14:24 rpm.stdout
Is this a bug that should be reported against rpm or something else? I'm certain I've seen it in other man pages, but offhand I can't find another example.
(This also happens on Fedora 29, JFTR.) The warning seems to stem from this line in rpm.8:
| […] | 175 The default \fIFILELIST\fR is | 176 \fI/usr/:lib/:rpm/:macros\fR::\fI/usr/:lib/:rpm/:macros.d/:macros.*\fR::\fI/usr/:lib/:rpm/:platform/:%{_target}/:macros\fR::\fI/usr/:lib/:rpm/\ | 176 :fileattrs/:*.attr\fR::\fI/usr/:lib/:rpm/:redhat/:macros\fR::\fI/etc/:rpm/:macros.*\fR::\fI/etc/:rpm/:macros\fR::\fI/etc/:rpm/:%{_target}/:macro | 176 s\fR::\fI~/.rpmmacros | 177 | […]
This line is too long for the standard layout. It already has hints (":"; zero-width break points) where it should be broken, but these seem to be ignored. So prima facie RPM has done everything right, and there is an error somewhere in the groff/man ecosphere.
That analysis was wrong: "cannot adjust line" does not mean that the line is too long, but rather that there are no spa- ces that groff can expand to adjust (justify) the line.
For rpm(8) this was worked around by formatting the default value as a code block, with line breaks after each colon, thus not requiring the lines to be adjusted/justified.
Tim