Hi! On Sun, 2026-07-12 at 12:02:45 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes: > > I see that in addition to changing from .IP to .TP, I also need to > > override the the TS register to restore the previous formatting > > behavior, since apparently that *also* changed in a > > backwards-incompatible way. That was immediately obvious when I tried to > > format the Pod::Man documentation with a patched pod2man that used .TP > > and got incorrect results. > > > Is the TS register another one of these magic registers that I have to > > set after .TH because it gets reset every time .TH is processed, and > > therefore cannot be meaningfully set in the pod2man preamble? > > I have merged code to the main branch of podlators to hopefully work > around this change and produce the same output with both older and newer > groff. Testing would be very much welcome; there are a lot of subtleties > here and I am not certain that I got all of them correct. Code is > available from either: > > https://git.eyrie.org/git/perl/podlators.git > https://github.com/rra/podlators
Great, thank you! I've built the dpkg man pages using podlator's HEAD, and the =item issues have disappeared now. I checked also for items with bullets and numbers and they look good to me. Also for =over with different indent levels (2 and 4). I did a quick scan over a couple of man pages and didn't see anything obviously wrong, but I didn't do a detailed rendered diff against a previously working groff version. > The timing for the upcoming Perl release is as bad as it possibly could > be, which is my fault for sitting on a new release for too long. (I'm > sorry about that, Guillem; I did see your bug report but didn't have a > chance to address it until now.) Hey, no problem! I know how that is. :) > I am hesitant to make a release today > without some confirmation that the fix appears to be correct, but I will > try to make one very soon since there are a large number of other > accumulated fixes that I have been sitting on. I can perform more checks tomorrow, if that would be more reassuring, but I'm not sure I'd be covering all the tricky details you might be concerned about. I also have to say I found it a bit surprising that these breaking changes went into groff, when from what I think I've seen in other instances, behavior from very ancient and no longer supported historic version of roff/troff seem sometimes to be used as rationale for current suboptimal behavior (?). In any case, thanks Russ for fixing the fallout, even if you perceive you are otherwise not making other progress. This is still highly appreciated! Thanks, Guillem
