Re: contributing to groff

[Dave Kemper]

Hi Rob, and welcome to the groff community!

On 1/11/22, Rob Kolstad <rob.kolstad@gmail.com> wrote:
> How do I send in suggestions (changes)?  I can't imagine this
> document has a high rate of change, given its publication date.

You'll be either pleased or horrified to learn that since the 2018
release of groff 1.22.4, there have been over 400 commits
(http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/log/doc/groff.texi) to the
groff manual, everything from documenting new features to rewriting
problematic passages such as the one you found to clarifying groff
behavior.

In particular, a monster commit from about 14 months ago
(http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=2a63d94e)
entirely rewrote the paragraph you quoted to give a better
historical overview of sentence-spacing practice and to not cite
phantom publications.

Branden Robinson has already done a huge amount of overhaul of this
manual, but any extra help in correcting errors or polishing the
wording would be appreciated.

The best way to get your changes considered is to open new bug reports
against the "Documentation" Item Group in the groff bug tracker
(http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=groff) and attach patches with
the edits you'd like to see, making sure you are generating those
patches based on the most recent version of the manual in git.  Write
back here if you need more instructions on how to do any of that.