Re: GNU eqn clarifications and reforms (was: EQN - special words)

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2023-06-01T22:49:58+1000, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Jun 2023, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> 
> > I would encourage you to write your eqn user's guide against
> > 1.23.0.rc4.  I don't expect eqn's behavior to change at all between
> > that RC and final release, whenever that is.
> 
> Got it.  Thanks Branden.
> 
> When one uses -mm, using any RC is often risky as the MM macros seem
> to be the last thing to be fixed in a release cycle.

Ah.  I had no idea I was recapitulating some sort of pattern here; I
started tinkering with groff mm late in our release cycle because (1)
I'd met my goals with man(7) and ms(7), which I had prioritized more
highly; (2) I had a lot of grievances with its man page, some of which
were impossible to correct without learning the package and conducting
experiments; and (3) there were outstanding bug reports against it that
seemed like they should be tractable.

So in this case, it was just a matter of my semi-random walk nearly
ending there.  (More precisely, I was chewing on tbl when Bertrand
returned from hiatus.  His timing was exquisite; I'm still pleased with
some of those tbl bug fixes.)

Something I've done that had no precedent was that I added regression
tests to mm.  I hope the over time this will increase your confidence in
groff's implementation.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/contrib/mm/tests?h=1.23.0.rc4

It's a beginning.  I've got more mm fixes in my private branch.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/contrib/mm/ChangeLog?h=branden-2023-05-22

(That's a "private" branch; a personal, ephemeral one.)

Regards,
Branden

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature