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

[Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)]

On 8/1/22 00:55, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> > Yes, distributors that incorporate packages with man pages using the new
> > `MR` macro, racing ahead of those same distributors' update of groff
> > 1.23.0 (whenever that happens), run the risk of some unhappy man page
> > readers.
>
> As i explained earlier, people doing packaging will rarely be
> aware what the technical requirements for formatting any given
> manual page are, and when i watch packagers, i don't usually see
> them scrutinizing manual pages for good formatting.  And again, the
> choice of using .MR will not be made by *any* packager, but by the
> upstream project.  So the packages would only have the choice to
> delay the package update, waiting for a typically *different*
> packager to update groff.  It is not clear delaying a software
> update for such a reason is even a good idea.

I usually consider it bad practice for upstream developers to make use 
of features not yet released, or not yet packaged to mainstream distros.

It's not nice to tell someone building your source that they also need 
to build the dependencies from source (I've seen some projects that 
require building LLVM from source to be able to build their program; of 
course I'm not building LLVM from source just to build a random program).

IMO, dependencies should always be used from the system, and should be 
stated clearly (including versions if necessary) somewhere.  That's part 
of why I think providing an upstream package is good: it forces you to 
specify Build-Depends.

I don't think any upstream project should use a feature that's not 
released at least in a distro, and preferably in a reasonable set 
(Debian unstable, Fedora, Arch, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

Only for experimental features that are not intended to be used by most 
users or even contributors, can one use an unreleased feature (as I did 
for example with some subtargets of the `make lint` target; I don't 
expect it to be run by anyone other than me for now).

So, if upstream programmers follow some basic common-sense rules, 
packagers shouldn't even have to look at these problems.


Cheers,

Alex
--
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/