The varieties of mdoc experience (was: Running the grohtml pipeline as a pipeline)

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2024-03-23T00:08:27+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > Maybe I should do with grohtml what наб accused me of doing with
> > mdoc:
> 
> Any links to that?  Sounds like a funny discussion.  :D

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65101

I admit that sometimes I enjoy disputation.  This was not one of those
times.  What I have seen of наб's work product is consistently diligent
and scholarly.  I feel badly when I antagonize people who do good work,
even inadvertently.

наб did help me discover a mistake of mine; when I said I was correcting
a bug noted in groff_mdoc(7) (and in mdoc.samples before it) with one
aspect of my changes to `Nm`'s rendering, I was wrong.  What had
happened was that (I think) Werner Lemberg or Ruslan Ermilov fixed it
when they rewrote groff mdoc(7) in proper groff instead of the AT&T
dialect, but no one remembered to update that part of the man page.  So
something I thought was documentary of a defect with the status quo was
actually outdated material.

Also, наб's strongly aggrieved message motivated me to dig up and make
handy for myself a copy of 4.4BSD's mdoc implementation, so that I could
easily A/B compare it with groff.  And that's a right thing to be doing.
I had been using just mandoc(1), but apparently to наб, Ingo Schwarze
and I are like Indiana Jones and René Belloq: we have both fallen from
the pure mdoc faith. :)

It may be also cold comfort, since I still have no intention of making
groff mdoc(7) produce slavishly identical output to 4.4BSD, but I much
prefer to "deviate", in Ralph Corderoy's term, in an _informed_ way.

(And I note, _slavish_ identity with 4.4BSD output could require us to
re-introduce bugs.)

> I was actually a bit surprised that Paul Eggert mentioned grohtml(1)
> as an improvement over man2html(1).  While man2html(1) is ancient and
> quite bad... grohtml(1) output is on par with that.  Let's improve
> that!  :)

Sure.  Maybe we'll find out that there's someone out there who loves
grohtml 1.23's output as much as наб loves groff 1.22.4 mdoc's, and I
can get my ass chewed out again.  😅

Regards,
Branden

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