* Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org>, 2022-01-09, 01:00:
The man(1) man page reads: "Firstly, the command line option -p or the
environment variable $MANROFFSEQ is interrogated. If -p was not used
and the environment variable was not set, the initial line of the
nroff file is parsed for a preprocessor string."
This seems to imply that $MANROFFSEQ takes precedence over '\"
declarations; but AFAICT it's the other way round.
MANROFFSEQ predates me, and is something I've never personally found it
convenient to use. However, on the assumption that it's useful to
somebody, its current precedence seems very weird.
Agreed it's weird.
My normal preference would be to have the following priority, from
highest to lowest:
* command-line option
* environment variable
* filesystem state
This looks sensible in principle.
But beware that Lintian currently sets MANROFFSEQ to empty string in
order to speed up man page checks (see bug #677874). It would be
desirable not to break it.
--
Jakub Wilk
