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

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Alejandro,

> But no-one is forcing the use of .MR.  The feature could be used for
> new projects which don't care about portability to old systems.

It's more likely a project doesn't have the resources to test
portability across systems rather than not caring.  (Look how much time
it takes Branden and Ingo.)  And because it's open source, an old-system
user who wants the project can take on the porting effort and feed the
changes upstream.  .MR increases the porting work and the feedback will
be to stop using it.

> Projects where portability is important, such as the Linux man-pages,
> will have to wait a bit more to be able to start using them.  My idea
> is that when groff 1.23.0 arrives to Debian stable, I'll consider
> using it in the project.

It seems your only concern is Linux man-pages, which is fair enough,
and that groff is the only man-page formatter to consider.  GNU groff's
man macros have to take account of a bigger world and be backwards
compatible to avoid yet more fragmentation and confusion.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.