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SEE ALSO fails


From: Douglas McIlroy
Subject: SEE ALSO fails
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2021 22:14:28 -0400

The contents of man pages are not groff's business. If a man page must
be conditioned by what's on a local system, that can likely be done
with .sy. But man(1) should not enable .sy. Enjoy the catch-22.

Another reason to keep the status quo in regard to referring to
nonexistent man pages is that some installations provide only man 1.
Alas, I use one such. I am very glad to be told that man 7 groff
exists even if it's not immediately at hand. I can and do go look for
it elsewhere.

However, various uses of groff might be helped by environment
inquiries, for example, to find  whether an optional .so file exists.
This could be done by  a request like
      .isfile file string
that assigns 1 or 0 to string according as the file exists. Or it
could be done by a builtin string invoked this way: \*[isfile file].
(The notion of a builtin string fills in the analogy macro:request ::
string:__.). Given the environment query, an adaptive man page would
be easy to implement, though unwise.

I oppose the idea of a special process for installing groff. That
would be a loathsome spawn of autoconfig. I am not excited by the idea
of environment queries, either, because (1) their implementation is
likely OS-dependent , (2) I am not sure that they provide enough value
for cost, and (3) there could be lots of kinds of queries. But at
least they would be general-purpose.

Doug



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