On Sun, Jan 11, 2026 at 08:01:29AM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > At 2026-01-10T19:10:44+0000, Gavin Smith wrote: > > A pretest distribution for the next Texinfo release (7.3) has been > > uploaded to > > > > https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-7.2.90.tar.xz > > It appears that, when viewing man pages, info(1) does not filter out > OSC 8 terminal escape sequences used to embed hyperlink information.[1] > groff produces these since its 1.23.0 release 2½ years ago.[2] > > The less(1) pager interprets OSC 8 sequences since its v581 general > release[3] almost 5 years ago. > > Exhibit attached. > > If info cannot interpret these escape sequences, it should discard them. > > If info cannot parse these sequences well enough to reliably discard > them, it should ask man(1) or {g,n}roff(1) not to generate them.
It is probably easy enough to discard them. We could discard all OSC sequences. I'd never seen the problem before, but today I ran "info grotty" on my system and saw the misdisplayed sequences. Viewing the manpage for "groff" via info gives very deformed output; it is practically unusable. You don't just output these sequences for web URLs, but also use "man:*" URLs for any references to other manpages. Fortunately, it seems that not too many manpages are generated with these sequences, except groff's own manpages. I suggest you do not start outputting these sequences by default for any manpage cross-references, otherwise there are too many. The occasional web URL is probably ok. This change to groff output also breaks any other program that would use the output from "man".
