[bug #57485] [PATCH] accept any number of arguments for .Dd in the groff_mdoc(7) macros

[Ingo Schwarze]

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #57485 (project groff):

I'd like to stress that this patch indeed fixes a bug.  In 4.4BSD, 
it was *not* documented that .Dd requires exactly three arguments
and prints the current date otherwise, but several manual pages
existed that gave a single quoted argument of the form "Month day, 
year".  Documenting the weird behaviour of the groff_mdoc(7) macros
was done much later.  The mandoc(1) utility has been providing the
more useful behaviour proposed here for years, in a way that is in
particular compatible with the original 4.4BSD manual pages, and
it has been documenting the more useful behaviour for years, too.

So calling the current groff_mdoc(7) behaviour "documented behaviour"
is misleading.  At some point, a bug was documented instead of fixed 
in groff, a bug that broke the formatting of even the original 4.4BSD
manuals, i.e. those of the system where these macros came from.


To clarify two minor details:

Losing unbreakable spaces is totally irrelevant.  For any sane 
input, the footer line is always a single line only; no linebreaks
occur.

Of course this ticket only applies to the non-Mdocdate case,
nothing changes for Mdocdate.


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