Re: Plan 9 man added a new macro for man page references

[Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)]

Hi, Branden!

On 8/1/21 1:09 PM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > I support this plan ;-)
>
> Cool!  I'm glad to see some discussion about it...it would be _so nice_
> to land this and OSC 8 hyperlinks for terminal emulators in grotty(1)
> for the next groff release.  Those would be new features we could really
> trumpet.
>
> "30 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee brought you HTML, groff is hot on
> his heels!"
>
> Well, maybe not.  You can see why I'm not in sales.

Thinking about it twice...

Given mdoc(7) already implemented that, and that the basic difference 
between mdoc(7) and man(7) is basically that man(7) is simple and 
doesn't have semantic macros (only style macros), and mdoc(7) was 
designed to superseed man(7) by having semantic macros instead of style 
macros (but with the side effect of being much more complex in the way), 
I think it would be wrong to "port" back (some of) those features back 
into man(7).

Either we should move to use mdoc(7), or we don't at all.  (And for the 
moment, I think I'll keep with the man(7) simpler macros.)

What are your thoughts?

Regards,

Alex

--
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/