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

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Alex,

At 2024-12-20T12:11:00+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 19, 2024 at 09:31:49PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > 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 won't mourn the deaths of indifferently maintained legacy Unix
systems.  But I also want to keep groff, a better *roff than AT&T troff,
available as a clarion to awaken their users from their dogmatic,
proprietarian slumbers.

> 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'm confident Ingo would prefer that I govern the pace of new feature
additions to groff man(7) as sternly as possible.  ;-)

> groff(1) and mandoc(1) are universal, though.  Isn't groff(1) portable
> to practically every system?

I'm not sure what our portability story to non-POSIX systems is these
days.  We used to have one.  Granted, MS-DOS used to matter more...

> As GNU make(1) maintainer says (IIRC), don't write portable Makefiles,
> write GNU Makefiles, and port GNU make(1).

These days the maintainer is Paul Smith.  I don't know if he said that
originally, but POSIX 2024 make is _vastly_ improved over that of
previous editions of the standard.

I was just last night reading a book with a chapter on Make from _1997_
and I was appalled at how current it _still_ had been, with respect to
"standard" Make, until earlier this year.

Things are _much_ better now.

https://gist.github.com/Earnestly/29deee4f18346da6630ed1df760f1590

Pick up those new standard Makefile features and push them as hard as
you can.  Drop in a '.POSIX:' and see how far you can now go.

And of course you can keep using GNU Make while you do so.

Regards,
Branden

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