Re: Proposed: QS/QE macros for quotation in man(7)

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Branden,

On Thu, Dec 19, 2024 at 09:31:49PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > I prefer \[lq] and \[rq] over .QS and .QE.
> 
> If everybody just used groff (please feel free to start!), I wouldn't
> bother with this proposal, for that precise reason.  My proposal is
> stimulated in part by experiences contributing to the Bash and ncurses
> man pages.  Both of those projects expect to be portable to a wide
> variety of systems, some of which benightedly don't use groff as their
> man page formatter.  Some don't even use mandoc(1), which can at least
> be said to have been attentive to developments in Unix since 1995.

Hmmm.

> For some vendors, the end of the Unix Wars meant the end of development.
> Lay off all the engineers and collect rents from locked-in enterprise
> deployments.  Share price go up.

That's the moment when they deserve dropping support for their systems.
That will hopefully help in killing them, even if only a little bit.

> > I prefer \% over a new boolean to a macro.  Both are two bytes ("\%"
> > vs " 1"), and one is standard roff since forever.  Plus \% is a
> > generic tool vs the boolean which a specific tool, and I tend to
> > favour generic ones.
> 
> Well, the Linux man-pages likely don't have to be portable to anything
> that isn't Linux, and groff is likely to always be available for Linux.

I need to keep portability to mandoc(1), which I'll keep doing as long
as mandoc(1) keeps doing their part on adding support for groff's man(7)
new features.

> I think your preferences are sound ones.  The problem is that we have
> no universally portable way anymore to ask the formatter for a quotation
> mark.  If your man pages can count on an environment where that's not a
> problem, by all means leave QS/QE on the shelf.

groff(1) and mandoc(1) are universal, though.  Isn't groff(1) portable
to practically every system?  As GNU make(1) maintainer says (IIRC),
don't write portable Makefiles, write GNU Makefiles, and port GNU
make(1).

> > For the same reason, I'm a defendant of cat(1) as a starter of a
> > pipeline, at least when typing interactively, even if it may be
> > considered a useless use of cat(1).  It actually saves typing cat(1)
> > later when you find out you need sudo(8) for reading the file.
> 
> This is a good point.  I've in fact tripped over that myself.

:-)


Cheers,
Alex

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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