Re: [groff] groff_man question

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Doug,

Doug McIlroy wrote on Mon, Jul 08, 2019 at 11:17:32PM -0400:
> Ingo Schwarze stated incorrectly:

>>  EE  This is a non-standard GNU extension.  In mandoc(1), it does the
>>      same as the roff(7) fi request (switch to fill mode).
>>
>>  EX  This is a non-standard GNU extension.  In mandoc(1), it does the
>>      same as the roff(7) nf request (switch to no-fill mode).

> "Gnu extension" should be read as "extension adopted by Gnu".
> .EX/.EE was introduced in 9th Edition Unix.

Thank you for pointing out the error, i corrected the manual page
in OpenBSD and in portable mandoc, see the commit below.

HISTORY information in BSD manual pages used to be somewhat unreliable
because Cynthia Livingston, who did almost all of the the original
research in 1989 and the following few years on behalf of Usenix in
the context of the UC Berkeley CSRG, had only limited access to
source code of releases older than 3BSD.  Most of the resulting
inaccuracies got fixed since 2010, but i suspect that quite a few
innovations introduced in Version 8 to 10 AT&T UNIX are still
misattributed to later imitations elsewhere because v10 source code
became freely available to the public much later than v6 and v7
source code, so it was easier to miss for people trying to research
the history.  This error was one example of that effect.

Yours,
  Ingo

P.S.
Whenever you feel bored, you are very welcome to look through
the manual pages of your favourity v8 to v10 features on
  https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/
and report any similar misattributions that might still be present.
I fear there may still be several, but they are harder to find
for people who have no experience with v8 to v10.


Log Message:
-----------
The non-standard .EX/.EE macro pair was invented for Version 9 AT&T UNIX 
and only got adopted by GNU two decades later.
Thanks to Doug McIlroy <doug at cs dot dartmouth dot edu>
for pointing out the error.

Modified Files:
--------------
    mandoc:
        man.7

Revision Data
-------------
Index: man.7
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/cvs/mandoc/mandoc/man.7,v
retrieving revision 1.143
retrieving revision 1.144
diff -Lman.7 -Lman.7 -u -p -r1.143 -r1.144
--- man.7
+++ man.7
@@ -160,7 +160,9 @@ This has no effect unless the tabulator 
 .Ic ta
 request.
 .It Ic EE
-This is a non-standard GNU extension.
+This is a non-standard Version 9
+.At
+extension later adopted by GNU.
 In
 .Xr mandoc 1 ,
 it does the same as the
@@ -168,7 +170,9 @@ it does the same as the
 .Ic fi
 request (switch to fill mode).
 .It Ic EX
-This is a non-standard GNU extension.
+This is a non-standard Version 9
+.At
+extension later adopted by GNU.
 In
 .Xr mandoc 1 ,
 it does the same as the
@@ -496,8 +500,8 @@ The syntax is as follows:
 .It Ic BI  Ta    n         Ta    current   Ta    \&
 .It Ic BR  Ta    n         Ta    current   Ta    \&
 .It Ic DT  Ta    0         Ta    current   Ta    \&
-.It Ic EE  Ta    0         Ta    current   Ta    GNU
-.It Ic EX  Ta    0         Ta    current   Ta    GNU
+.It Ic EE  Ta    0         Ta    current   Ta    Version 9 At
+.It Ic EX  Ta    0         Ta    current   Ta    Version 9 At
 .It Ic I   Ta    n         Ta    next-line Ta    \&
 .It Ic IB  Ta    n         Ta    current   Ta    \&
 .It Ic IR  Ta    n         Ta    current   Ta    \&