At 2019-12-21T14:51:23+0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > Colin Watson wrote on Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 01:15:30PM +0000: > > On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 01:14:06PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > > Side note: I am not the biggest fan of this business of encoding a > > bunch of other projects' release history in groff, so please don't > > take me as an advocate of that. However, I am generally an advocate > > of the position that if one is going to encode this sort of thing > > then it makes sense to keep it up to date. > > I completely agree with all you are saying here. [...] > I do think that removing version verification and just printing > whatever the manual page author requests in the same way as mandoc(1) > is already doing it would be an improvement, but that should be > discussed separately, not in this ticket.
There's another Debian bug report that impinges on this question. https://bugs.debian.org/284002 How about we officially relax the semantics of ".Os" in mdoc(7) from "operating system" to, say, "original source"? Meaning whatever the author/maintainer of the mdoc(7) document uses as a version control identifier. This would increase parallelism with man(7)'s fourth .TH argument, and give projects an easy place to hang an identifier for the page release. Debian #284002 proposes overriding the "BSD" default with a distribution-specific string in the mdoc.local file, and that seems a resonable thing to do to me _as a fallback_ when there is no .Os in the first place, and with the current mnemonic and documenttion, a portable GitHub project developer, for instance, has little reason to suspect they should use this macro. As far as I can tell, this is already designed for with the string "doc-default-operating-system". So my proposal is twofold: 1. Update groff_mdoc(7) as described above, to encourage mdoc(7) page authors to use this to record a package/project name and release. 2. Encourage Colin to add the following to mdoc.local: .ds doc-default-operating-system Debian 11 (bullseye)\" or similar. Thoughts? Regards, Branden
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