At 2022-07-17T09:18:28-0500, Dave Kemper wrote: > On 7/16/22, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I think a new, writable troff register would be a better way to > > manipulate this feature--which is basically a style diagnostic--than > > a warning category. > > This suggests that one day there might be other warnings that fall > into the style-diagnostic category, and thus that establishing a > common prefix, maybe "sd*" or "style-", would be helpful to group all > these knobs together.
My sentiments have shifted back to the warning category approach on this because I have identified two further roff language-level style nits that it seems worth warning about. 1. Giving a macro a quoted argument without a closing quote. Example: .MAC foo "bar" "baz 2. Calling a request with the no-break control character when that has no effect. Examples: 'nr a 1 'tm this is my error message It's evidently hard for people to keep the list of requests that imply a break in their heads, and it's worse for them to suppose changed behavior when the no-break control character is used when that's not going to happen. I think doing so can lead a cascade of bad suppositions about the formatter's behavior. Our Texinfo manual calls out both of these practices as poor style. So I will probably allocate some more slots in our precious 32-bit .warn register to these, and add a pseudo-category "extra" analogous to "all" and "w". Names for the individual warning categories are still TBD, as is the inclusion of "w" in "extra". This will be post-groff 1.23 release work. Anybody wondering how that is going should consider subscribing to the bug-groff and/or groff-commit lists. > > "sentence." seems too broad and too vague. > > True, but with a prefix establishing it as a style diagnostic, a vague > following term might be OK. With it back under the umbrella of a warning category, I think it's easier to get away with the term "sentence". Regards, Branden
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature