[bug #65692] tmac/mdoc.tmac: fix minor differences from the "mandoc" software

[G. Branden Robinson]

Update of bug #65692 (group groff):

                  Status:                    None => Rejected               
             Assigned to:                    None => gbranden               
             Open/Closed:                    Open => Closed                 

    _______________________________________________________

Follow-up Comment #1:

Speaking as the de facto maintainer of _groff mdoc_, exact parity with
_mandoc_ output is not a goal for me.

> The output of 'mandoc' should have priority

I completely disagree.  Among other factors, _groff mdoc_ long predates the
_mdocml_ project.

As another point, a formatter should render _man_ and _mdoc_ documents
similarly.  I'll return to this point below.

> This is to facilitate the comparison of the output of files with
the 'mandoc' requests.

I do this routinely when preparing patches to the _bash_, _ncurses_, and
_procps_ man pages.  I don't diff _groff_ (_nroff_) output against _mandoc_'s,
though--what I do is check that my _changes_ (to the man page content) behave
as expected.  If they don't, I investigate what.  In principle, I could
uncover a bug in either implementation this way.

This ticket is effectively demanding extremely strict specification of _mdoc_
output, something that I feel was not contemplated by its author, Cynthia
Livingston (though I'm open to correction on this point by Ingo Schwarze, who
has been in contact with her about _mdoc_ history).

Extremely strict specifications take a lot of effort to prepare validation
mechanisms for; worse, they limit the flexibility of implementers to solve
problems, particularly when facing conjunctions of language features that the
designers did not contemplate.  _mdoc_ is a large, complex language and I do
not believe its author or maintainers have the superhuman insight necessary to
foresee all possible valid inputs.

Further, because _man_ and _mdoc_ documents should render similarly, any
unspecified point of _mdoc_ rendering will get decided and possibly applied to
_man_ output as well.  So what you are proposing is that _groff_ slavishly
follow _mandoc_'s choices not only for _mdoc_ but for _man_ as well.

While I'm sure that prospect would excite _mandoc_'s more obnoxious partisans
to the point of ecstasy, I find it totally unacceptable.

The suggestions in your bug reports would greatly improve in quality if you
considered anything but their most immediate and obvious consequences.

Closing as rejected.


    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?65692>

_______________________________________________
Message sent via Savannah
https://savannah.gnu.org/