Re: [Groff] An environment variable for enabling compatibility mode

[Christian Jensen]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002 address@hidden wrote:

Hi Ralph et al.
>
> I guess groff could say that a book author has to do the same thing,
> i.e. if they know groff 1.16 formats their book OK then they keep 1.16
> around for their book.

I hope I'm not misunderstanding anything here, but you seem to forget that
not all users of groff may in fact be in a position to keep a version
around. I use the system-wide installation on a Solaris machine where I
have no sysadmin rights. And even if I could manage to install a local
copy on my own account then surely this cannot be a desirable thing? I am
currently writing a PhD thesis using groff and the me macro package, and I
have many references with inserted (). If this functionality or syntax
changes it will be impossible to manually adjust these poperly. And I'm
using many groff extensions, so compatibilty mode is not an option(!).

So I join the voices who advocated that this should be an 'opt-in'
feature, not an 'opt-out' one.

Best,
Christian Jensen