Re: groff now undoing .ad settings after .IP

[Russ Allbery]

"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> writes:
> At 2024-03-16T12:32:44-0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Okay, I think we've sorted out the way forward for groff that would
>> address the immediate issue.  That leaves three questions: should I do
>> something in the next release of Pod::Man, should I assume that the
>> next release of groff will default to ragged right, and is there a way
>> for Pod::Man output to support the intent of the AD register.

> In summary, I think the answers are, in order:

> 1.  Probably, yes.
> 2.  No.  I have no plans to change it.
> 3.  Not at present.  I'd like to create one for groff 1.24.

Okay, I think this narrows it down.  The Perl 5.40 release is coming up,
and I'd like to get the next release of podlators into it, with the hope
that Debian will go to Perl 5.40 before the trixie release.

I think I have two options for the upcoming podlators 6.0.0 release:

* Do nothing.  Justification will be broken with groff 1.23 and fixed with
  groff 1.24, which will hopefully make it into the trixie release.

* Add ".if n .ds AD l" to the preamble, and leave ".if n .ad l" after .TH
  as is.  This will make the formatting work everywhere the way that it
  historically has (although will get pod2man output no closer to
  supporting AD properly) and means that the time frame for groff 1.24
  becomes irrelevant to podlators, at the cost of an additional line in
  every generated man page.

I think I'm leaning towards the second option because it's simpler and
provides the maximum decoupling of timelines, and one additional line in
the preamble isn't too much of a price.  But I could be talked out of it
if anyone thinks that's the wrong approach.  Note that this will mean the
creation of a whole lot of man pages in the wild that override the AD
register, which will probably be with us for many years to come.  (But
this is already true of all the man pages with ".if n .ad l", which is
arguably an even bigger hammer.)

I can then revisit and potentially add more complicated code should we
figure out a way for pod2man to change the nroff default justification but
still honor AD if set.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>