Re: Man patches

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2023-09-26T14:54:29+0000, Mike Gran wrote:
> While I have nothing to contribute, I have to say that these man page
> patches have been pretty interesting.

Thanks, Mike.

> I've not really thought much about proper roff style.  So I feel like
> these last couple of weeks have been like a class in how to groff.

That's great to hear!  The ncurses man pages operate under unusually
tight constraints as *roff documents go: firstly, they're written in
man(7), which has an unhappy history of attracting the attention of
people who decided--without doing much research first--that the language
would be trivial to parse.  That's not _completely_ their fault;
well-disciplined man page writing, even before some unknown person with
a gleam in their eye first started writing a shell script called
"man2html", could seduce one into such an assumption.

So many people started down that road, only to founder, that we may
never know all of them.

https://invisible-island.net/scripts/man2html.html#same-name

(I observe that nobody optimistically raced to such an assumption
regarding mdoc(7), which I would think should strike that macro
language's vociferous advocates as a blade with more than one edge.)

Secondly, ncurses is intended to be portable to environments that many
software projects don't bother to support, like proprietary Unix (System
V descendants and the like).  These tend to require accommodation for
the lack of features that all _currently maintained_ *roff formatters
(plus OpenBSD's mandoc(1)) support.

Even Solaris troff finally gave up the ghost; Solaris 11 ships groff.
HP-UX incorporated a port of groff 1.23.0 within a few days of its
release.  But I don't know if groff is its "system troff".  AIX
_supports_ groff but again, I don't know what the default troff is.

Some day, we will be able to safely pronounce AT&T troff dead, and when
we do, a new "common dialect" of portable man(7) will be a pleasure to
define.

> It had been a while since I tried my hand at creating text with
> groff,  But now I'm playing with it again.

Please feel free to join the groff at gnu dot org mailing list and share
your questions, experiences, and frustrations.

Regards,
Branden

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