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

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Branden,

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 12:58:31AM +1000:

> (Did I digress some?)

To digress even more: combining the enigmatic character of TeX error
reporting with the verbosity of C++ error reporting would get you
to the Mariana Trench of usability.

> At any rate, I don't think an MB string is too
> offensive, because almost no one will need to know about it.

Maybe.

> man(1) implementors, and us, are about it.  At present man-db
> man(1) and Brouwer/Lucifredi man(1) [does anyone still ship that?]

I think some Linux distros likely do, but don't remember off the
top of my head which ones, and it seems likely that more provide
it as an option to be selected by the user.

> don't, I think,
> permit the user to specify *roff string or register definitions at the
> command line, so assuming MB gets out the door before Colin Watson acts
> on my request to add such a feature (to tune page rendering options),
> users won't even be able to meddle with it without editing man.local.

As an additional data point, the mandoc implementation of man(1)
neither supports the equivalent of troff -d name=string nor man.local
and has no intention to do so in the future.

Yours,
  Ingo