"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> writes:
> This change is too bad, as it defeats the _user_-configurability of > `TP` tag spacing from its paragraph--but as with adjustment and > hyphenation, POD's policy is that the _reader_ of a man page is not > permitted to alter these--two horses have already bolted, so what's a > third? Yeah, you shot yourself in the foot with that one, and I don't see an easy way for you to repair the damage given that groff 1.24 is already out in the wild. If you had not chosen to change the default tag separation for .TP, I wouldn't have needed to override it, and thus your reader configuration desire could have been achieved. I would be happy to support user configuration, but not at the cost of backward compatibility. (As we've previously discussed, hyphenation and adjustment are a harder problem because in those cases pod2man already had a long-standing practice of changing the default back when end-user configuration was not supported, and finding a way to support both, and all of the already-released versions of groff, is complex.) Perhaps a lesson for the future is that if you want to make something user-adjustable, it is crucial that you not also change the default at the same time and thus leave document authors no choice but to ignore groff_man(7) and override the default if they want to preserve the existing rendering of their document as the default. > I don't share your assessment that it's "very common". It's certainly common in POD documents that I have written. I did indeed not check to see if other people followed me in that and perhaps they do not anywhere near as much as I thought. I will note that this change broke the formatting of literally the first POD document I looked at (Pod::Man's own manual page), but of course that document was one I wrote. Your search methodology would not have caught this because it uses tags of three characters with an indent of four. None of my decisions would change based on whether it is statistically common, since it's a pattern I want to support in pod2man. Colin can certainly make an independent decision about whether this is relevant to the configuration of the Debian groff package; my belief that it is common is just guesswork, and perhaps most cases of this are via POD documents. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
