Re: .bp not working in groff 1.23.0 when it worked fine in 1.22.4

[Dave Kemper]

On 1/23/24, Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig@simnet.is> wrote:
>   Macros for historical documents should be put into a separate
> directory (e.g., tmac/historical), which can then be searched
> with the '-M <directory>' option.

As the NEWS item (posted in full a couple hours ago in this thread)
mentions, this change *increases* the back compatibility of some
historical documents, so it would likely be eligible for your proposed
tmac/historical directory on those grounds.

The root of the problem, as the savannah bug you cited points out, is
that the historical -ms specification was ambiguous about how it
handled post-display spacing, so naturally different authors made
different assumptions.

However, .bp arguably shouldn't have been affected by the change,
since it probably wasn't subject to the same historical ambiguity.  (I
bet implementing that distinction would require some macro gymnastics,
though, since a user-invoked .ns *should* suppress .bp, while a
-ms-invoked post-display one shouldn't.)

>   The user should have control, not a committer.

Since the user can always force extra vertical space or a page break,
the user does have control.