Re: [Groff] RE: Small bug in groff 1.19.2 footnote number contro

[M Bianchi]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 01:52:04AM +0200, Gunnar Ritter wrote:
>       :
> All variants of the original -mm which I have seen so far
> have been very similar. It is likely that they all use the
> :p register in the same way.

        One definition of backward compatibility is "All Bugs Are Preserved".

The current  mm  macros make good use of the wider-than-2-characters name
space, for which I am very grateful.  I accept that my older troff documents
that reach under the curtain and twiddle hidden state will break.  Fortunately
I _usually_ restrained myself, but ...


Personally, I'm not interested in preserving (most) undocumented "features" of
past implimentations of  mm .  I am interested in fixing real bugs and adding
some carefully considered new capabilities.


So I ask the question of the group:

        Do we want to implement "backward compatibility" of undocumented
        things like the number register  :p  in the groff package?

I vote no.

-- 
 Mike Bianchi