Re: [Groff] Re: Simplifying groff documentation

[Gunnar Ritter]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> wrote:

> I know Gunnarr has concerns about macros we might add going unused, but I
> have some ability to influence that.  I've successfully pushed over
> 200 man-page patches upstream to different projects.

The other side of this is that you would either need to get
the new macros into the -man macros of AIX, HP-UX, and the
other remaining closed source Unix implementations, or you
should inform the maintainers that their manual pages become
less portable with such "fixes". While these systems have
lost a lot of importance, there are still people who care.

I find it a disturbing issue if we, as the maintainers of
a few implementations, extend a widespread macro set and
encourage people to write less portable documentation.

This is another point where the comparison with HTML 3/4
is wrong: We are not the W3C for manual pages. In fact,
there is no comparable organization, as the POSIX people
have deliberately decided not to standardize documentation
beyond the existence of a "man" command. If we extend -man,
the result is not the equivalent of HTML 4, but essentially
the same as a "proprietary" extension to Web page markup.

To avoid misunderstandings, I repeat that the situation is
completely different for other troff-related aspects. We
certainly do not need to care whether arbitrary documents
compile with AIX troff. But nroff -man is a special case.

        Gunnar