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[bug #58653] Please add back in the mdoc(7) manual


From: Ingo Schwarze
Subject: [bug #58653] Please add back in the mdoc(7) manual
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 18:51:41 -0400 (EDT)
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; OpenBSD amd64; rv:77.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/77.0

Update of bug #58653 (project groff):

                Severity:              3 - Normal => 1 - Wish               
             Assigned to:                    None => schwarze               

    _______________________________________________________

Follow-up Comment #1:

I *VERY* strongly oppose this idea.

Documentation ought to be correct, complete, concise, and easy to find, which
implies all in one place.  This particular, totally unmaintained manual page
was full of errors, blatantly incomplete, terse to the point of
incomprehensibility, yet not concise, but putting excessive weight on aspects
of marginal importance.  Besides, it caused a needless split of documentation
that can, without any downside, be in one place, causing people to miss the
real documentation.  I'm not going to waste my time enumerating all the many
deficiencies of this ancient, unmaintained document.  No, importing it would
not be "better than nothing", it would be a huge step backwards.  It is even a
terrible starting point for working on something better.

In general, it is an extremely bad idea to have a short and a long version of
the same manual page.  All that does is making it likely that both get out of
sync and eventually neither are correct.  One reference manual is enough.

If groff developers think groff_mdoc(7) needs an overview before diving into
the specifics, i can copy the "MACRO OVERVIEW" section from
  https://man.openbsd.org/mdoc#MACRO_OVERVIEW
into the beginning of groff_mdoc(7), probably between A MANUAL PAGE TEMPLATE
and CONVENTIONS, but i'm open to suggestions for the exact location, and to
tweaking it if you think that's necessary.

    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?58653>

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