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bug#31228: Update GREP manpage


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: bug#31228: Update GREP manpage
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2018 12:48:25 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.7.0

On 04/20/2018 09:03 AM, Laura Morales quoted Ingo Schwarze as writing:
1. BEST: Switch to the better mdoc(7) language which does provide
such markup.

This does not work with Solaris nroff and troff, which we'd still like to port to, as Solaris is still a live platform.

2. If they insist on using the obselete man(7) language and
want to remain portable, use standard macros like .I and
.B and accept that no hyperlinks will appear. It is
a limitation of the chosen language. You can't have the
cake and eat it, too.

Although this would port, it would be less readable on newer systems. For example, the HTML man page wouldn't contain links to the grep manual. We can do better.

3. If they don't care about portability and live in a GNU-only
world, use the -man-ext macros .MT and .UR, documented in
groff_man(7). mandoc(1) implements these for GNU compatibility,
but other formatters may not.

(3) is not as unportable as Ingo suggested, since the MT and UR macros can work outside the GNU environment when included in the man page. Please try the attached patch, which I've installed into the grep master. If it runs afoul of the troff subset that Ingo is using, please let us know and (ideally) suggest a fix.

using \(.g to test for availability of features is
utterly stupid. *ANY* formatter that wants to stand a chance to
format anything properly positively *must* define it, no matter
whether it is groff or not.

No, Solaris nroff can format the grep man page properly and it does not define \n(.g.

Attachment: 0001-doc-port-better-to-mandoc.patch
Description: Text Data


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