most widespread complaints about groff 1.23.0

[G. Branden Robinson]

Doug's message of earlier today prompted me to write this, but we were
due for a retrospective anyway since it's been a year since the release,
give or take a few days.

In my assessment, the two issues drawing the most widespread complaint
about groff 1.23.0 are:

1.  "Hey, where did the colors go in my less(1)-colorized man pages?"

and

2.  "groff sure does complain a lot now about fonts that don't exist"
    (also in man pages viewed on terminal emulators).

The former seems to have settled down now that Debian (immediately) and
Arch Linux (belatedly) removed a popular patch to man.local from their
distributions.  Derivatives of these two are popular (and include
Ubuntu), so over time they adopted the patch removal.

The latter was due mainly to the creative imaginations of people writing
tools that generate man(7) from other input formats, and at least three
of those, (Ruby) asciidoc, (Python) docutils, and (Haskell) pandoc have
revised their generators consequent to feedback from me--and in the last
case, from Ingo Schwarze as well.  All now generate more idiomatic
man(7) than they used to.

In third place I would rank a subject that has surely gotten more
_written_ about it than the other two combined, but in significant
volume in only two places I have seen: a huge debian-devel thread[1] and
an equally huge LWN post and comment series[2] reporting on the former.
That would of course be this NEWS item.[3]

  The an (man) and doc (mdoc) macro packages no longer remap the -, ',
  and ` input characters to Basic Latin code points on UTF-8 devices,
  but treat them as groff normally does (and AT&T troff before it did)
  for typesetting devices, where they become the hyphen, apostrophe or
  right single quotation mark, and left single quotation mark,
  respectively.  This change is expected to expose glyph usage errors in
  man pages.  See the "PROBLEMS" file for a recipe that will conceal
  these errors.  A better long-term approach is for man pages to adopt
  correct input practices; the man pages groff_man_style(7),
  groff_char(7), and man-pages(7) (subsection "Generating optimal
  glyphs"; from the Linux man-pages project) contain such instructions.
  Doing so also improves man page typography when formatting for PDF.

...and "expose problems" it did.  The "recipe" mentioned therein
continues to be popular.  For instance, Fedora grabbed it as well,[4]
albeit with less apparent drama than afflicted Debian or the LWN
commentariat.

Perceptible complaints are only about the hyphen-minus character; almost
no one seems to express concern about any violence done to ' or `, which
the recipe renders unusable for conventional (single-)quotation,[5] and
no one mentions ^ or ~ either, which also were reformed.[6]

I credit the quantity of discussion to the matter being an apparently
simple one and therefore easy to form an opinion about.  To credibly
opine on SGR escape sequences or font name resolution in GNU troff, by
contrast, requires one to exhibit comparatively specialized knowledge.

While sometimes frustrating to deal with, the thematic focus of
the foregoing complaints on (arguably) cosmetic issues I take as a good
sign.  People aren't complaining that groff doesn't work, crashes,
infloops, and so on.  When such complaints do arise, they get addressed.

I've prepared a GNU Savannah query for all resolved tickets of Important
severity whose fixes are expected in groff 1.24.[7]  Some are fixes for
regressions.  Doug's message about "groff -ms -p" not working is one.

If a distributor were looking for patches to backport, I'd start there.

Thoughts?  Divergent experiences or impressions?

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/10/msg00085.html
[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/
[3] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/NEWS?h=1.23.0#n206
[4] https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-f5d1e63191
[5] https://urlr.me/jLYgt
[6] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/NEWS?h=1.23.0#n532
[7] https://urlr.me/2Vb3d

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