Re: [Groff] Re: new grotty format

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, Rick Richardson wrote:

> How long a period do you propose for the default to remain overstrikes
> before it is switched to SGR?

I don't know, but a period of zero length sounds extremely harsh on the 
users.  At least one officially-released Groff version should be used as 
a grace period, if you ask me, and perhaps more.

Look, you are effectively deprecating a widely-used feature.  It is
generally accepted practice to declare a feature deprecated for some time 
before it is turned off by default.  Think about all those users who will 
all of a sudden see garbled man pages just because they upgraded their 
Groff and didn't read the fine print of the NEWS file.

> Yes, I think there should be a flag day, it should come as soon as
> possible, and a method can be provided to *disable* flag day for those
> people who will never be ready for a flag day no matter what you do to
> prepare them.

As someone who has some experience in going that way, let me warn you: 
users don't always like such an approach, don't always read the docs to 
know in advance they should set some obscure environment variable, and 
don't like to be told that they need to tweak their systems to make the 
new version work reasonably well.