Re: [Groff] An environment variable for enabling compatibility mode

[Jon Snader]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 11:33:21AM +0000, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> Back in the `Surprise, Surprise' thread I raised the issue of a single
> compatibility flag being insufficient.
> 
>     http://www.ffii.org/archive/mails/groff/2001/Aug/0085.html
> 

IIRC, I was not entirely convinced by your arguments in that thread.
Since then, I have come to accept your superior wisdom.  We clearly
need some method of improving existing groff functions while
maintaining compatibility for existing documents and scripts.

Having to specify (potentially) dozens of options is not too
attractive, but as far as I can see, anything else causes compatibility
problems.  I believe we need very fine granularity (i.e. we need
to be able to enable/disable a particular functionality).  If we
just have a switch to enable the foobar set of options we run into
the problem of someone needing some but not all of the foobar
options.

Jon Snader