Re: [groff] Release Candidate 1.22.4.rc3

[Larry Kollar]

Ingo Schwarze <address@hidden> wrote:

>> * My semantic macro package extending groff_man(7), if I can get it
>>  where I'm happy with it and folks on the list don't bleed from the
>>  eyes about it.
> 
> That would be a HUGE step backwards, making the groff manual pages
> even less portable (they are already among the 20-30 least portable
> manual page sets in those about ten thousand free software projects
> that i looked at, and the amount of portability problems in groff
> manual pages is vastly larger than in most other of those 20-30
> projects).  You surely want to make that worse, right?

Being a fan of semantic markup myself, I’d normally agree. On the other
hand, wouldn’t the groff manpages always come with a groff formatter?
Groff is the *de facto* standard for *roff these days; there are certainly
systems that use Heirloom Troff or something similar for a default *roff
formatter, but they won’t have the Groff manpages anyway.

I for one wouldn’t mind semantic extensions to groff_man(7). It would
allow for the kind of flexibility HTML offers now, except for an equivalent
to tidy(1) to corral presentational markup. It might also go a long way
toward eliminating a lot of the portability issues—who’s to say alternate
*roff developers won’t adapt the extended macros for their own packages?

There are three things I have tried (and failed) multiple times to wrap my
head around: TeX, emacs, and mdoc. Stuff like

        .Op Fl c Ar class Oo Fl p Ar end-class Oc Oo Fl s Ar subclass Oc

makes my eyes cross. That’s on me, I know… but that’s why we have
different formatters, editors, and macro packages—everybody can find
something that works for them.

OTOH, I certainly wouldn’t object if someone rewrote all the Groff man
pages in mdoc. It might be a good warmup to whacking down that
Texinfo beast. ;-)

        Larry