Re: XREF in man(7)

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Alex,

At 2023-10-03T20:22:17+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 03, 2023 at 08:16:00PM +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > Hi Branden,
> > 
> > I've imported some archaic pages.  Those pages used some ".XREF"
> > after the TH and before SH NAME.  They seem to be a duplication of
> > the name, possibly for some weird software that wouldn't parse the
> > name.
> > 
> > Did you know about that thing?

No, never heard of it before.

> <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/src/alx/linux/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?id=c59098078e6cab14e63941a4f2518bc1003a7d89>

Scrolling through this, I see a Perl script that appears to process
these XREF "macro calls" as well as cross references to page names
spelled with leading and trailing '!' characters.

Another telling point is that "XREF" is too long a macro name for
AT&T-compatible *roffs.

My guess is that this is one of many bespoke attempts at hyperlink
anchor placement and linkage that people have grafted onto man(7) over
the years, with `MR` in groff 1.23.0 being my attempt--though `MR` will
only achieve its full flower once we get Deri's changes or some
workalike equivalent landed, so that a compilation of man(7) (and
mdoc(7)) pages can have "local" (intra-document) links without relying
on a man(1) implementation to resolve "man:foo(1)" URLs.

Regards,
Branden

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