Re: [PATCH v2] man*/: ffix (migrate to `MR`)

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Ingo!

On 2023-08-16 18:33, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> That perspective is not really helpful for general purpose Linux
> distributions: for these, the Linux man-pages project matters a lot,
> and that project is not considering the man(7) language as obsolete at
> all.  That i keep recommending changing that stance does not appear to
> have much effect so far

It does have an effect, or I like to think it has.  Branden and I are
pushing to improve man(7) to be on par with mdoc(7) where it's lacking.

I also recently added support for mdoc(7) in the build system, so new
mdoc(7) pages will enjoy the same linting level to which I subject our
existing man(7) pages.  If anyone wants to write new pages using
mdoc(7), they're welcome.  I'm not going to require man(7) (but I
prefer it for my own pages).

<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/share/mk?id=c76a587148d9b69667852311ece53403b1458844>
<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/share/mk?id=5a34548ecbf4200b4a7bcc3ce9f26bedd84450cb>
<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/share/mk?id=3c8198d1786501eb4a9e9a46c61c17ff233f3d54>

So, if anyone wants to add a page that's not present, and decides to
write it using mdoc(7), it'll be welcome.  That includes the suggestion
of a new intro.1, which IIRC was written in mdoc(7).  I should revise
that page.  I lack experience using it, but I guess I'll learn more
with enough time.

Also, if anyone wants to fork this project and rewrite it using mdoc(7),
or maybe use it for having a documentation repo of whatever project,
I made it easy to do so.  (In fact, I added mdoc(7) support for linting
an mdoc(7) page at my job.)

I even plan to add support for mm(7) pages, if POSIX deigns to talk to
me to provide their sources.

> and isn't relevant for the questions at hand.
> Either war, a disagreement regarding the merits of some policy is
> not a good reason to deprive users of information they might require.
> 
>> I expect you will want to emphasize this in the release announcement,
>> when the time comes.
> 
> In the Linux man-pages project release announcement, i recommend
> simply saying that groff_man(7) replaces the former man(7) that used
> to be bundled in the Linux man-pages project.  For the purposes of
> the Linux man-pages project, the man(7) page distributed with mandoc
> isn't useful, so no need to confuse the users of the Linux man-pages
> project by talking about it.

I'll probably have a few suggestions of how it could works, so that
every distro understands what to do (even the small ones), but yeah,
I'll keep it simple for the generic case, and suggest that most
distros probably want to have a symlink from man(7) to groff_man(7).

> 

[...]

>> Unnerving, no?
> 
> Heh, buhuuu!  <evil grin>

:-}

Do you have in your plans to add support for MR?  That's probably a
blocker for applying Branden's patch in the master branch.

Cheers,
Alex

> 
> Yours,
>   Ingo

-- 
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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