Re: man(7) .TH font change, was: groff man(7) `B` macro...

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Ralph,

On 6/19/22 13:09, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Ingo,
>
> > The price to pay for this very small benefit of .MR is that pages
> > using the new feature will become broken in a very bad way for all
> > output modes on formatters not yet supporting it.
>
> Plan 9 could add .MR because they also controlled all the man pages
> within the Plan 9 OS.  Groff doesn't have that luxury so it's just
> creating yet more confusion and the need to make the extra
> recommendation to avoid .MR.

We don't have full control, but we have considerable control, since I 
maintain the Linux man-pages.

Let's consider a similar situaction (IMHO): C2x attributes, which come 
from C++, and introduce [[attr]] for standard attributes, and 
[[vendor::attr]] for vendor-specific attributes.

C2x introduces a backwards-incompatible syntax (since an old compiler 
can't handle them), but a very useful one, since it makes it clear that 
attributes are attributes (before, function-like syntax could confuse 
programmers (that's happened to me), especially when seeing attributes 
for a system with which they were not familiar).  And it's not breaking 
any existing code, because [[]] was illegal before.  This makes C2x 
attributes _very_ portable, since compilers can work with them freshly, 
without backwards-compatibility restrictions.

Many people have blamed the standards committee with arguments such as 
"these people are smoking dope again", and similar stuff.  Well, right 
now, of course, it's impossisble to use them in code that intends to be 
portable to existing compilers.  But fast-forward 20 years, when every 
compiler has support for it, and then you have a super portable, and 
super readable feature.

TL;DR: let's think in improving things in the long term, or we will be 
stuck with each vendor having their own attributes syntax.

The same applies to man(7) .MR, I think.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Alejandro Colomar
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature