Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[Anthony J. Bentley]

Ralph Corderoy writes:
> You're just prolonging the agony.  Make nmh on macOS depend on
> macOS's troff.  Whether that's a virtual package satisfied by others
> or an actual package if there's only one.  You've identified one thing
> mandoc is formatting wrongly.  It may be formatting other things wrongly.
> And if not now, then it may do in the future, especially if knowedgable
> man-page authors continue to write nmh's *man pages*, not mandoc-input.

You greatly exaggerate the problem. Speaking as someone who's reported
several dozens of compatibility bugs to mandoc and seen nearly all of
them fixed, Mandoc's compatibility, though not at 100%, is very close.
I myself am rather fond of the classic troff pipeline, but mandoc comes
with its own set of advantages that groff cannot provide, like powerful
apropos(1), tag integration with pagers, significantly better HTML
generation, and smaller footprint. That's why with its 99.x%
compatibility it has become so prolific.

> And if not now, then it may do in the future,

Pure FUD. Mandoc has an explicit goal of groff compatibility. If you
follow the mailing list and commit log, you'll be aware that most
commits come with an addition to its thorough regression test suite.
Ingo Schwarze has done an excellent job of maintaining this.

>From my perspective, mandoc's modern feature set and approach of native
hyperlinking in every output format have provided a noticeable boost to
popularity of writing manpages, stimulating several projects to provide
real manpages in a world where they would otherwise have dropped troff
completely in favor of pandoc or docbook or plain web-only HTML. Mandoc
has been a very good thing for the manpage-reading, manpage-writing
community. It has had success displacing groff on its own merits.

The use of .fc is the only issue in the nmh manpages that mandoc chokes
on. It's a minor formatting choice that has an easily accessible
alternative. Switching to it provides a better out-of-the-box experience
for a significant chunk of the nmh userbase. To me, the sensible choice
is clear.