Re: Is .rd implemented at all?

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2020-12-16T20:30:33-0600, Dave Kemper wrote:
> On 12/15/20, Dorai Sitaram <ds26gte@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >  Thanks Dave, for the suggestion. That doesn't seem to be the
> >  problem, however, on my machine (Ubuntu 20.10). No-argument cat
> >  works as expected.
> 
> Then something peculiar to the Ubuntu groff seems to be behind this.
> Ubuntu is a Debian-derived distro, and the concurrent "local timezone"
> thread here points out Debian's proclivity to customize groff in
> incompatible ways.

I don't think that statement is quite fair--I've known Colin for a long
time and he is a diligent developer and package maintainer.  Different
projects face different pressures.  Debian's reproducible builds
project[1] is a fairly simple and crude, but nevertheless useful, form
of binary verification, an assurance process for which much stronger
forms are an area of active research[2].

Debian's time zone patch has confused me too, as seen in this very
thread, but it's there for an understandable reason.  By eliminating
gratuitious differences in the artifacts generated from a source tree,
we can eliminate the need for such a patch, and improve the
"inspectability" of our changes to groff in day-to-day development.
When I first started working on groff I used to diff build trees before
and after a change with great frequency, but I lost this habit.  In part
that was because my confidence increased as my knowledge grew and as I
wrote automated tests to reassure myself (and my fellow developers), but
the most acute reason was that I simply got sick of screening out all
the noise in the diff that was simply due to %%CreationDate comments and
similar, and the spurious noise of changed hash key ordering, both
topics covered by https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?57218.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
[2] https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/nicta_full_text/6449.pdf

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