From swartik@ida.org

On line 873 of pod2man, there is a comment that reads​:

  # if you know how to get "​:s please do

Is the problem caused by the lack of a colon in second parenthesized
expression of the regular expression on line 951? Or should I ask,
why doesn't that RE have a colon? I inserted one and pod2man translated
"​:s correctly. Of course, troff being what it is, there may be a good
reason why the colon was omitted...

Site configuration information for perl 5.00404​:

Configured by root at Tue Jun 2 08​:54​:04 EDT 1998.

Summary of my perl5 (5.0 patchlevel 4 subversion 4) configuration​:
  Platform​:
  osname=solaris, osvers=2.5, archname=sun4-solaris
  uname='sunos fricka 5.5 generic sun4m sparc sunw,sparcstation-20 '
  hint=previous, useposix=true, d_sigaction=define
  bincompat3=y useperlio=undef d_sfio=undef
  Compiler​:
  cc='gcc', optimize='-g -DDEBUGGING', gccversion=2.7.2.3.f.1
  cppflags='-I/usr/local/include'
  ccflags ='-I/usr/local/include'
  stdchar='unsigned char', d_stdstdio=define, usevfork=false
  voidflags=15, castflags=0, d_casti32=define, d_castneg=define
  intsize=4, alignbytes=8, usemymalloc=y, prototype=define
  Linker and Libraries​:
  ld='ld', ldflags =' -L/usr/local/lib'
  libpth=/usr/local/lib /lib /usr/lib /usr/ccs/lib
  libs=-lsocket -lnsl -lgdbm -ldl -lm -lc -lcrypt
  libc=/lib/libc.so, so=so
  useshrplib=false, libperl=libperl.a
  Dynamic Linking​:
  dlsrc=dl_none.xs, dlext=none, d_dlsymun=undef, ccdlflags=' '
  cccdlflags='-fpic', lddlflags='-G -L/usr/local/lib'

Locally applied patches​:
 

@​INC for perl 5.00404​:
  /usr/local/lib/perl5/sun4-solaris/5.00404
  /usr/local/lib/perl5
  /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/sun4-solaris
  /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl
  /usr/local/lib/perl5/sun4-solaris
  .

Environment for perl 5.00404​:
  HOME=/servers/swartik
  LANG (unset)
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH (unset)
  LOGDIR (unset)
  PATH=/usr/bin​:/usr/ucb​:/usr/ccs/bin​:/usr/openwin/bin​:/usr/dt/bin​:/usr/local/bin​:/usr/local/share/bin​:/pub/local/bin​:/servers/swartik/bin
  PERL_BADLANG (unset)
  SHELL=/bin/csh

From [Unknown Contact. See original ticket]

Steven Wartik <swartik@​ida.org> writes​:

On line 873 of pod2man, there is a comment that reads​:

    \# if you know how to get "​:s please do

Is the problem caused by the lack of a colon in second parenthesized
expression of the regular expression on line 951? Or should I ask, why
doesn't that RE have a colon? I inserted one and pod2man translated "​:s
correctly. Of course, troff being what it is, there may be a good
reason why the colon was omitted...

It's a problem with nested quote marks on section header lines. It's been
fixed in the rewrite of pod2man that uses Pod​::Parser and comes with the
latest development version of Perl.

--
Russ Allbery (rra@​stanford.edu) <URL​:http​://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>