Re: [Groff] Progress report on the portability audit -- and what to do about URLs?

[Eric S. Raymond]

Larry Kollar <address@hidden>:
> >(1) Rewrite www.tmac in portable code (no groff extensions).  This
> >   could work because most third-party viewers do follow .so  
> >directives.
> 
> If possible, that would be best. As you said, it may not be a realistic
> alternative -- especially if you include long request/macro names in
> "no groff extensions."

I'm looking at code now...OK, it turns out long names are portable;
the C man2html goes to the extra effort needed to support them, 
and the Perl viewers get this for free from Perl string handking.

Still, I don't think this is a realistic alternative.  There's too much
poorly-specified crap going on in that package; I shudder at the
thought of trying to emulate it all with a different implementation,
in a more restricted language, and I'm not going to try to do it.

> >(2) Add portable implementations of .URL and .MTO to an-old.tmac
> 
> That would be OK.

I've written such implementations and added them, not to an-old.tmac
but to the standard preamble I've developed for groff pages.  (This
is also where I've defined .SY, .OP, and .YS.)  In every case I've
looked at so far, this has been sufficient to decouple the page 
from www.tmac.

This actually may be a general solution.  We already know that the
grohtml driver now looks upstream at the man source, so it will be
able to see these and do something appropriate.

> I'd like to see at least the list constructs (OLS,  ULS,
> DLS) added as well. I don't think any of the current manpages use
> them, but they should be encouraged.

This is not a good time to be proposing features for which there
is no precedent or existing usage.

> Of the feasible choices, I would pick (2).

That's looking like the optimum to me, too, now that I've dug a 
little deeper.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>