Re: man(7) .TH font change, was: groff man(7) `B` macro...

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Ralph,

On 6/19/22 16:00, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Alejandro,
>
> > We don't have full control, but we have considerable control,
> > since I maintain the Linux man-pages.
>
> And it's great you're on the list.  For those who don't
> know how Linux man pages are structured, you're referring to
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.  So not the pages from
> individual projects like Postfix, Samba, Git, curl, etc.

yep.

> On this out of date system, the *.gz man pages under
> /usr/share/man, so ignoring /usr/local/man, come from about
> 600 packages.  Package man-pages is the biggest supplier of
> those at about 17% of the man-page files, but that still leaves
> quite a few others.

Interesing.

> More important, though, are the systems processing man pages
> which won't understand .MR.  man pages written to be compatible
> with those will have to ignore .MR or have some local test to
> decide whether their internal macro should use .MR because it's
> available or stick to the tried and tested method.

This is a short-term problem, very similar to the attributes one.  But 
no-one is forcing the use of .MR.  The feature could be used for new 
projects which don't care about portability to old systems.  Projects 
where portability is important, such as the Linux man-pages, will have 
to wait a bit more to be able to start using them.  My idea is that when 
groff 1.23.0 arrives to Debian stable, I'll consider using it in the 
project.  That is likely to happen around 2023 or 2025, depending on if 
groff releases before the freeze or after it.  oldstable and 
oldoldstable can apply some .tmac fix as you suggested, if they need it 
to backport the Linux man-pages.

I guess that by 2030 or 2040 many pages will be using .MR.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Alejandro Colomar
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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