Re: [TUHS/groff] Provenance of .SB macro in man pages

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2020-01-25T17:28:25+0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi Branden,

Hi Ingo!  Thanks for following up--you're the only person who found
man page examples, and one of only two who replied at all.

> > .\" ====================================================================
> > .SS History
> 
> I think this should be ".SH History" rather than ".SS".

It's not a big deal to me either way in a section 7 page.

> Here i would insert a sentence similar to
> 
>   The man macros first appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.
> 
> then perhaps continuing in a way similar to:
> 
>   All macros described in this page not listed as extensions
>   were supported, except ...

Yes, a bit of an introductory sentence is apropos and I've added one to
my working copy.

> I suspect .SB may have come from SUN, but i'm not sure.
> In the BSD tapes from the CSRG, here are the first occurrences:
> 
>   BSD/4.3.3Reno/usr.sbin/sliplogin/sliplogin.8:.SB TCGETS

That's interesting, because according to the Minnie TUHS archive,
4.3BSD-Reno's man macros didn't support .SB[1].  The transition to mdoc
was already underway[2].  sliplogin does sound like the sort of thing
that might have come from USENET, possibly written by SunOS users.

>   BSD/4.4/contrib/sun.sharedlib/man/man5/a.out.5:.SB M_SPARC
>   BSD/4.4/contrib/sun.sharedlib/man/man1/ld.1:.SB LD_LIBRARY_PATH

The directory names certainly do seems to suggest Sun provenance.

>   BSD/4.4/contrib/groff-1.08/lkbib/lkbib.man:.SB REFER

Well, that's one of ours.  :)

> If you have access to SunOS 4.0 (Dec. 1988),

I don't.  I have something that purports to be the distribution tapes of
SunOS 4.0.3, but no way to perform a full install.

One of the files ("tape2/18.") contains a whole bunch of man pages which
use the .SB macro 2,128 times in total.  Unfortunately no tmac files are
in the chunks of "tape" that are recognized by file(1) as tar archives.

Still, that's pretty suggestive.  I'll document my current belief and
understanding in the page, with qualification.  If I'm wrong, then with
any luck some irritated know-it-all[3] with copious documentary support
will rage at us the day after we ship groff 1.22.5.

(That type of person never shows up any sooner. :D )

> i would try to start digging there and see what you find.  Of course,
> that was in turn influenced by SVR4 (Oct. 1988).  Tahoe didn't contain
> any .SB yet, so you may not have to go back further than June 1988;
> then again, .SB *might* have existed somewhere else already and just
> not made it into Tahoe...

It would certainly be fun to play around with SunOS 4.0 (or 4.1.4) if
someone had a QEMU disk image of a fresh install handy.  That was the
first Unix system I spent a lot of time on (and I spent way more than
was healthy for my GPA), on SparcStation IPCs in 1993.  I did my
learning at the console with no windowing system.  I remain fond of the
console font, even if its apostrophe and grave accent characters were
offensively incorrect.  ;-)

Regards,
Branden

[1] 
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-Reno/share/tmac/tmac.an.old
[2] https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-Reno/share/tmac/tmac.an
[3] There are plenty of those on TUHS, but I couldn't draw them out.

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