groff release management (was: groff_man subsections in HTML: indentation and TOC)

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Hans,

At 2021-04-21T11:46:00+0200, Hans Unzner wrote:
> Hi Branden,
> 
> sorry for the delayed response, but I just figured out that this
> message was placed in the junk folder.

Whoops.  As we're both GMail users, you'd think Google had run
sufficient metrics on both of our sent folders to make a more reliable
determination of our status as non-spammers.  Well, as every Googler
knows, it's way more important for a metric to exist than for it to have
any validity[1].

> Thanks again for your investigation.

No worries!

> Have you an roughly idea when 1.23.0 will be released?

Not really; I'm not in charge of releases.  Bertrand Garrigues is our
maintainer and release engineer.  I'm junior staff.  :)

> I saw there are a lot of open points on the list...

Yes, but few if any of them constitute a barrier to release (i.e.,
they're not "blockers").  We have a test suite thanks to Bertrand's
efforts prior to groff 1.22.4, and this appears to have proven pretty
effective at keeping our Git "master" branch from "going red", at least
for x86-64 GNU/Linux systems.

The list I shared is a personal list of goals; I reported it to the
group to gauge support (or, more precisely, opposition) and I fully
expect Bertrand or the team collectively to say "enough's enough, let's
release on 2021-MM-DD".  Almost anything I personally want to do can be
deferred until the next release.

More importantly, we need feedback from our users--people to
build and run release candidates on their varying platforms and verify
that (1) the "make distcheck" target passes and (2) the groff they have
built behaves reasonably, with no obvious problems.  (Anything horrid
that sneaks past "make distcheck" is worth consideration as an addition
to the test suite.)

So far, apart from Ingo Schwarze doing a spate of solid work on various
non-Linux Unix platforms and correcting some portability issues late
last year, there has been little such feedback.  The only production
site that I know is using a post-1.22.4 groff is Michael Kerrisk's
man7.org website[2], and he's started using a dirty tree recently which
has me wondering what he's having to patch...

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/
[2] e.g., https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/groff_man.7.html (scroll
    to the bottom)

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