Re: * RL * code review and strategy for macros set?

[Dave Kemper]

On 8/12/20, Mike Bianchi <MBianchi@foveal.com> wrote:
> you will find that the
> macros sets are built with fine-tuning in mind.

And in situations where they aren't -- if you can't make an individual
macro do precisely what you want -- you can always write your own
wrapper around it, or even your own version of that macro,
cannibalizing code from the standard version as needed.  This way
you're copying only small portions of the standard package, minimizing
this problem:

> I advise _against_ modifying the standard *.tmac files, especially with the
> sets like  me ,  ms  and  mm .  They rarely change, but when they do you loose
> the benefit of the fixes.

Yeah, for historical packages they change more than you might expect:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/log/tmac/s.tmac
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/log/contrib/mm/m.tmac
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/log/tmac/e.tmac-u

and will hopefully continue to evolve to support new output formats:

http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?58946
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?58947
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?58948