Re: man page width limit and example indentation (was: rseq(2) man page)

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2023-01-11T00:30:16+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> On 1/10/23 22:39, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Well, some of it, I'm still trying to fix for 1.23.  I _still_ have not
> > heard back from Bertrand.  It's been two weeks.  I need to start
> > considering begging Werner to come out of retirement just long enough to
> > tag and push some tar archives.  :-O
> 
> You can't do it, right?  Or do you?

I can create the tag in Git, but I don't have a GPG public key that the
FSF recognizes as having a "maintainer" bit, so I cannot validly upload
a distribution archive to alpha.gnu.org.  Apart from signing issues, I
don't have authorization to upload there, or know the correct procedure.
Since this is an RC, I don't need to be on a whitelist (if one exists)
to email info-gnu, since only final releases are announced there.  The
plan was to announce RC2 to the groff list and the GNU platform-testers
list.

I suspect the only things that _strictly_ require an official GNU
maintainer are generation of the signature for the distribution archive,
and upload of that archive to alpha.gnu.org.

If I were in Bertrand or Werner's position, I would prefer to perform
the Git tagging and archive generation ("make dist" or preferably "make
distcheck") myself.  But AFAIK there's no _technical_ barrier to me
doing those things.  (I already "distcheck" before _every_ set of
commits I push.)  But in theory I could just hand either of them an
archive of 1.23.0.rc2 and say "trust me".

> Yep.  Now I understand.  So yeah, I never try to guess how much the
> page will take up on screen, and just check experimentally.

That's a sound approach.  Nevertheless I would like to make tbl(1)'s
output more predictable on terminals for all groff users.  That should
lower user frustration.

> You're right.  I don't remember what was the exact issue we had with
> it.  Anyway, .in just works so far. :)

I really like weaning man page authors off of *roff requests; I may have
to take another look at this issue someday.  :D

Regards,
Branden

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