Re: [Groff] The case against the case against .EX/.EE & .DS/.DE

[Eric S. Raymond]

Gunnar Ritter <address@hidden>:
> > I'm not sure where .DS/.DE
> > came from, but considering the relatively large number of uses without
> > local definition I'm sure it must be historical somewhere.
> 
> Can you say in which pages you discovered them? I find much
> fewer examples for .DS, without a characteristic pattern.

It's a good thing you asked.  Turns out I was counting instances
rather than files containing, and that both .DS/.DE and .EX/.EE 
tend to be used more than once on a manual page if they're used at all.

I have since written a little tool called 'mangrep' that recurses
zgrep -l over the manual tree.  It shows me that in my corpus, DS is in
these 21 files:

dictionary.5
muttrc.5
radiusd.conf.5
rlm_acct_unique.5
rlm_always.5
rlm_attr_filter.5
rlm_counter.5
rlm_detail.5
rlm_expr.5
rlm_files.5
rlm_mschap.5
rlm_pap.5
rlm_passwd.5
rlm_realm.5
rlm_sql.5
rlm_sql_log.5
rlm_unix.5
users.5
radsqlrelay.8

For completeness, here are the other counts redone using mangrep so
that multiple instances in the same file are only counted once.  Note
that these now include instances where macros are locally defined or
requests are used in locally-defined macros.

88 use .ti.  Up from 78.

15 use .EX/.EE or .Ex/.Ee.  They are:

wireshark-filter.4
groff_tmac.5
keymaps.5
pam_krb5.5
procmailex.5
procmailrc.5
procmailsc.5
smb.conf.5
snmpd.examples.5
groff.7
groff_mdoc.7
groff_trace.7
samba.7
genromfs.8

55 use mdoc .Xo/.Xc.  This figure counts .Xo/.Xc uses in Synopsis
sections, the previous 14 did not.

> An examination of the CSRG archives shows that .Ds had been
> defined in -mdoc as a "filled block display" in 4.3BSD-Reno,
> but was deleted with 4.4BSD.
> 
> Which DocBook tag should correspond to .DS?

A *filled* block display?  I have been translating it as an
unfilled block, with a <literallayout> tag -- that's what the examples
in my corpus seem to want, and the meaning it has in mm.  It differs
from .EX/.EE only in that it doesn't force the font to CW.
--
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>