Re: [Groff] man-page macro

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I propose to add the following macro .MP to both tmac.an and
> tmac.mm.  It is a convenient way to display a man page entry in the
> style required by man(7).

Your macro looks nice!  But I really hesitate to include it into the
`official' tmac.an file.  A lot of people who write programs for Unix
need to create man pages which run on all Unix flavours.  And in such
a situation you can't use `.MP'.

It is the same as with the extensions of gcc.  As usable as they are,
most people don't dare to use it since such source files won't compile
with other compilers.

This means that your macro will be used commonly only for manual pages
specific to GNU systems like Linux or FreeBSD.  But then it is easy to
add, say, a line

  .mso tmac.ext

at the beginning of the man page which loads extensions and useful
additions to various macro packages (not only related to man).

Please comment.


   Werner