Re: [Groff] Simplifying groff documentation

[Eric S. Raymond]

Gunnar Ritter <address@hidden>:
> I doubt it is useful at all. It is perfectly okay to use
> statements outside the "safe" set if they do not do harm
> when a viewer just discards them.

I think you just widened the meaning of "safe". :-).

> > On a related topic, there are a couple of man macro extensions that would
> > go a long way towards eliminating the need for people to do ugly troff
> > hackery.
> 
> Whatever macros we invent in this discussion are destined
> to remain irrelevant. The groff -man extensions have been
> around for years, but nobody except the groff maintainers
> cared. -mdoc has been around for over a decade, and it has
> failed to gain any acceptance outside the BSD niche. All
> we would achieve are, again, failures with programs that
> do not understand our extensions.

In general I might agree with you.  However, .EX/.EE and .DS/.DE
have a couple of interesting properties:

1. They are, by far, the most commonly invoked man macros that don't 
exist. :-)  That is, significant numbers of man-page writers think they're
there already.

2. This fact has gone unnoticed mainly because the errors you get when they
no-op aren't too severe.

So there's an argument that we'd just be supporting existing practice if
we put them in.

I don't think your citation of -mdoc is really on point.  IMO, the reason
it hasn't gained acceptance is that, while -mdoc markup is cleverly designed,
it is also quite complex -- more heavyweight than most man-page writers
want to deal with.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>