On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 06:40:21PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarn...@rhi.hi.is> writes: > > > 1) The comment is wrong, because the code was changed from what it > > originally was (in my patch in the original bug report; see the last > > line of my input in the first e-mail of this thread). > > Well, the comment is correct in that this is what is being attempted. :) > Apparently it isn't working again. > > Your original patch caused problems on HP-UX, which is why it was changed > upstream. See: > > https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=92979 >
I found my patch to be too complicated. A simpler and correct solution is worded at the end of this e-mail. > However, I think all those changes may have not been necessary and only > the missing backslashes were necessary and your original patch was > otherwise fine once those backslashes are added (and possibly more correct > in avoiding warnings). I'll give that a try. > There is no need for any changes (from the original). My patch was at the wrong place. > Apologies for the regression; this is the confluence of two things that > basically no one ever does (enable nroff warnings, and use this obscure > indexing code), so it's essentially never tested. > > > 1) 'F' is not a random register in manual pages. > > It is, though. It's a completely random register picked by Tom > Christiansen years and years ago to hang this feature off of because it > wasn't used for anything else. From the nroff and man-db perspective, > it's just some random user-defined register, not anything special. > I have a different conception of "random". The variable 'F' is in all manual pages, that "pod2man" creates. Besides that, it is an "input variable"(!) for "*roff". > Honestly, there's part of me that just wants to drop this entire feature > from Pod::Man, since I'm dubious that anyone actually runs roffitall more > than once every five years or so, or that it's worth maintaining all this > rather opaque code to support. But I try to be intensely backward > compatible about Pod::Man. > There is no need to change anything. While thinking about my suggestion of adding '-rF=0' to the code of "man" (hard-coded addition), I realized that it was a bad idea. Better to add it as an option to "man", but option "-r" is already used by it. So an environmental variable should be better. It could then contain all options that "*roff" accepts. A name like "ROFFOPTIONS" occurred to me. (Not sure if the following is really correct, as my memory is not so reliable.) While reading the code of "man", I saw the name "MANROFFOPT" (was searching for "ROFFOPT" (short for "ROFFOPTIONS"). Checking the manual page of "man", this was exactly the environmental variable I was interested in. So there are only two small changes needed to "man.c": 1) The default value of "roff_opt" is "-rF0" and not an empty value. Plus a comment about the reason. 2) Adding an explanation to the manual, saying what the default value is and why. In the meantime an user can define "MANROFFOPT='-rF0'" or even "MANROFFOPT='-rF1'" to get the list according to the "IX" macro. My statement ("indeed it can't") in an earlier e-mail of mine about: And "man" is not used to get these index entries, indeed it can't. is thus wrong. > -- > Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- Bjarni I. Gislason