My plan, as indicated in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1041731#62, had been to leave things much as they are for most of the period while trixie is in development, and then put the ".char - \-" etc. workarounds back in place for nroff output for trixie's release; this would have meant a higher chance of more manual page authoring tools being updated to handle the groff input language more strictly (although this isn't always easy, as Russ has indicated, since sometimes the input languages of those tools are less rich than groff).
However, after wading through an enormous amount of inordinately verbose stuff in my inbox about this, I'm afraid I've now lost patience with the whole thing and am definitely not willing to put up with it for another year or more, so I'm putting the workaround back in place now. Sorry to anyone who will end up dissatisfied by non-terminal printed output as a result. https://salsa.debian.org/debian/groff/-/commit/d5394c68d7 It is still true that being strict about the use of the "\-", "\[aq]", "\[ga]", "\[ha]", and "\[ti]" escape sequences (as opposed to "-", "'", "`", "^", and "~" respectively) will produce better printed output. -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
