Re: [Groff] LL Usage in an-old.tmac Incompatible with man Program on GNU/Linux

[Colin Watson]

My apologies for my comments being hideously belated; increasing
pressure of work combined with the groff list being less high up my
mailing list order in mutt than it should be has arranged for me to
hardly ever read this list for a couple of years. With most lists I
wouldn't bother to follow up now, but I seem to remember the groff
list's membership being pretty stable so I think this ought to be safe.
:-)

On Sun, Aug 14, 2005 at 11:16:06AM +0100, Keith Marshall wrote:
> A search for `man' in the Free Software Directory, at 
> http://directory.fsf.org, shows a first choice selection of a `man' 
> implementation from ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/linux-local/utils/man/; the 
> latest release of this, dated 2005-06-21, is version 1.6 -- I'm currently 
> using version 1.5m.  I believe, although I may be wrong, that this is the one 
> used by most Linux distros, other than those based on Debian, and it's also 
> the one on which I've based my Win32 port for MinGW.

As Werner pointed out, SuSE also uses man-db.

man and man-db originated as the same code base, and you can still see
traces of that here and there if you look very closely, but it was so
long ago that they took entirely different design directions and are now
essentially impossible to merge. Of course, each of the maintainers
reckons his version is better. :-)

I do wish that the other man had a better name, though. It makes it out
to be primary when it isn't really, and it makes it hard to talk about
it without confusion.

> BTW, the `man-db' implementation used in Debian is the second choice 
> selection in the FSF directory search; it's apparently maintained by Colin 
> Watson of Debian.  The reference suggests that it is very definitely 
> dependent on groff, whereas the primary `man' reference is intended to work 
> with any troff/nroff implementation.

The reference is in error here. man-db is intended to work with
classical troff/nroff as well, and has configuration options to allow
this. I believe it has been tested on Solaris not that long ago.
However, I no longer have convenient access to any systems running
classical *roff, and I would appreciate testing and patches from those
who do.

> > groff_man.man says this:
> >
> >   -rLL=line-length
> >      Set line length.  If this option is not given, the line length
> >      defaults to 78n in nroff mode and 6.5i in troff mode.
> 
> And, of course I *could* add that to the nroff invocation spec in `man.conf', 
> but that would still be a hard coded display width, rather than having the 
> dynamically adjusted properties `man' tries to achieve with the `.ll' 
> injection in the command pipe.

At least at the time, the man maintainer wasn't particularly active on
the groff list. I was, and thus I changed man-db to cope by using -rLL.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden