[bug #65474] [troff] spurious "warning: unbalanced 'el' request" when formatting zic(8) from TZDB project

[G. Branden Robinson]

Update of bug #65474 (group groff):

                 Summary: spurious "warning: unbalanced 'el' request" when
formatting zic(8) from TZDB project => [troff] spurious "warning: unbalanced
'el' request" when formatting zic(8) from TZDB project

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Follow-up Comment #9:

Dave's right.

See bug #60260.

There would appear to be 3 issues here, so I won't actually close any of these
as duplicates.

Bug #59434 says that _groff_ documentation doesn't adequately explain this
stuff.  I am now not surprised, since _groff_ matches `el` request to `ie`
ones (in the absence of explicit bracing, at least), differently from AT&T
troff.  So someone trying to document this matter on the assumption that they
behaved the same would likely run into trouble upon conducting simple
experiments.

Bug #60260 regards the actual interpretation of the formatter's language, and
control flow therein.

I'll leave this one to cope with the issue of when we should throw a warning,
how.

At present, I suspect I'll seize the current `el` request for
[https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62776 my desired `style` warning category].[1]
 I partially agree with Bjarni that such diagnostics should exist.  I disagree
with his discursive hectoring about how people should write their _roff_
documents.  I'm comfortable exhorting the user with style warnings and advice
in documentation, but not with treating the exercise of well-defined (if
lousily documented) language semantics of 50 years' standing as errors.

To be concrete, I think the input:


$ cat EXPERIMENTS/el.roff
.el .tm this is unreachable code
$ nroff -ww EXPERIMENTS/el.roff
troff:EXPERIMENTS/el.roff:1: warning: unbalanced 'el' request


..._should_ warn, if style warnings are enabled.

But the first thing to cope with is #60260.  Let us then see if Paul's input
makes noise at all.

[1] ...retaining recognition of "el" as an undocumented synonym of "style" to
accommodate old scripts, yadda yadda yadda.


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