Re: [Quilt-dev] [patch 02/26] Eliminate or replace blank lines.

[Jean Delvare]

On Sun, 17 Jun 2018 17:39:30 -0400, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2018-06-17T22:26:00+0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > Hmmm. I see the improvement in the formatted output, but the absence
> > of blank lines in the man page "source" make it pretty hard to read
> > now. I would appreciate some form of spacing at least before each
> > section to make it easier to navigate whenever a developer needs to
> > edit the document. Does roff provide no way to achieve this?  
> 
> It does!  There are a few possible approaches, which are not mutually
> exclusive.
> 
> The empty request (just a dot on a line by itself) can be used for
> vertically spacing the input.  Here are some conventions, all of which
> I've seen in groff's own man page corpus.  For instance, I'll put a
> segment of pfbtops(1) at the end of this message.

Sounds good to me.

> There are 3 features of note in it.
> 
> 1. A single empty request is used between sentences;
> 2. Two empty requests are used between paragraphs; and
> 3. The empty request plus a comment of a line-spanning set of equals
>    signs marks off a section.

I don't think we need to go that far. My main motivation is that we
should see more easily where sections start, and also to make
"lists" (such as the lists of environment variables) easier to read.
Adding blank lines for every sentences or screen-wide lines for every
section seems too much.

> In principle the break-suppressing escape character (') could also be
> drafted into service for structuring the input, but in practice I have
> not seen that done, and I fear it would confuse non-expert consumers of
> the source.
> 
> What would you like to see in quilt's man pages?

For the purpose of this patch, I think I would simply replace all the
blank lines that were originally meant for input spacing with "."
instead of removing them as your patch did. Only if this leaves some
inconsistencies, then extra "." lines should be added or some "." lines
should be removed completely.

-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support