Re: [PATCH 4/9] man/clear.1: Migrate macro usage conventions.

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Branden,

note that i'm not planning to subscribe to bug-ncurses@, so please keep
me in Cc: if you desire feedback from my side.

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 04:06:24PM -0500:

> Argh.  I didn't test with mandoc, and I guess I should have.  It's just
> refusing to accept valid *roff syntax here.  I wonder if I can talk Ingo
> into supporting it.
> 
> How about it, Ingo?  Will you support people defining macros inside
> conditional block brace scopes?  ;-)

In general, it appears that mandoc supports that, see the example
at the end of this message - but you are aware that both defining
macros and using conditionals in manual page source code is strongly
discouraged, right?  Let alone combining both features...

So if people do that, they should be aware that they are ruining the
robustness and likely the portability of their pages, and that fixing
any bugs or adding any missing features related to such stunts is
likely to be high effort and low priority while i often have bugs
open that are high priority and low effort.  So such bugs, if any,
are unlikely to be addressed in any reasonable time frame and more
likely to rot for years before getting addressed.

That said, i tried to have a look what is *actually* going on,
but so far without success.  I believe the patch we are talking
about is

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2023-09/msg00088.html

I tried to apply that patch to both

  https://invisible-island.net/datafiles/release/ncurses.tar.gz # 6.3

and

  https://invisible-island.net/datafiles/current/ncurses.tar.gz # 6.4-20230923

but the patch fails to apply to either of the two versions.

Which version is that patch supposed to apply to?
Where is the version control system for ncurses (CVS, subversion,
git, whatever)?

Alternatively, can you show a complete test file exhibiting the problem?

Yours,
  Ingo

 ----- 8< ----- schnipp ----- >8 ----- 8< ----- schnapp ----- >8 -----

 $ cat tmp.man
.TH TEST 1
.SH NAME
test \- test
.SH DESCRIPTION
initial text
.if \n(.g \{\
.de mym
mytest
..
.\}
.mym
final text

 ----- 8< ----- schnipp ----- >8 ----- 8< ----- schnapp ----- >8 -----

 $ mandoc -Tascii tmp.man | col -b
TEST(1)                     General Commands Manual                    TEST(1)

NAME
       test - test

DESCRIPTION
       initial text mytest final text

                                                                       TEST(1)