Okay, I think we've sorted out the way forward for groff that would address the immediate issue. That leaves three questions: should I do something in the next release of Pod::Man, should I assume that the next release of groff will default to ragged right, and is there a way for Pod::Man output to support the intent of the AD register.
"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> writes: > If I don't get back to you soon enough, go ahead with your initial idea. > .if n .ds AD l > You'll want to keep >> .if n .ad l > for the sake of non-groff formatters, of course. I think the logic that would correctly honor the intent of AD and also maintain backward compatibility would be something like this: 1. If groff before 1.23.0 or not-groff, add ".if n .ad l" after .TH. 2. If groff 1.23.0, add ".if n .ds AD l" before .TH. Also having ".if n .ad l" after .TH would be harmless but insufficient. 3. If groff after 1.23.0... it's not clear what I should do, particularly since Pod::Man releases get baked into Perl core and thus have a long effective lifetime. Ideally from my perspective groff would default to ragged right and then I should do nothing in that case, since then I would be honoring AD correctly. (I don't know off-hand how to express that logic in roff, so if it does seem warranted to go with version checks, I'll probably be asking for assistance in writing them portably, assuming that this is even something that groff exposes. Or maybe there's a better proxy for the version check, like seeing if the AD register is defined.) There seem to be two groff development and release questions embedded in here: 1. Do you think you'll change the long-standing groff default from full justification to ragged right under nroff in the an macro set for the next release? 2. Do you have an expected time frame for the next release, which controls whether it's worth bothering with the second piece of logic above. I'd prefer to avoid releasing man pages that change justification partway through in the next stable release of Debian, but if a new release is coming before the next Debian stable release, it may not be worth embedding a fix for one specific groff version in every generated man page. If the answer to 1 is no, then there are other possible questions about how I could signal desire for a different default (maybe using some other register, for instance) without interfering with application of AD. Or maybe this is overkill and Pod::Man just doesn't support AD, although in general my development philosophy for Pod::Man is to try to converge on normal man page practices as much as I can given that POD is a far more limited language than roff and thus I can't represent some subtleties that roff can. > We're getting close to 35 years of ".ad b" being _groff's_ default, > and even if I think a lot of people won't consciously notice the > base paragraph indentation change--instead observing that, "huh, > lines fit now when they didn't used to, that's nice, but > weird"--_everybody_ will notice a change to adjustment, and some > will be as loud and destructive as the author of the Worst Man Page > That Has Ever Existed was. I think it virtuous to stand up to > brogrammers. For what it's worth, in over 20 years of maintaining Pod::Man with this design choice, I've never gotten a complaint about it, and multiple people noticed when it broke. Admittedly, the breakage is worse than always doing full justification, since it changes in the middle of the man page and thus looks more wrong, but my anecdotal experience is that people quite like this "feature" of Pod::Man and the advocates for full justification in nroff seem to be few and far between. -- Russ Allbery (ea...@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
