Hi Jon, At 2023-10-23T17:24:30-0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote: > When I wrote the article (last week) it was a lot closer :) > > As for why: Debian may have resolved this, for now at least, but this > is an issue that is sure to crop up in distributions that are not as > quick to pick up new groff releases. In that sense, the topic is very > much timely.
Interestingly (perhaps), this wasn't the first thing that caught fire after the groff 1.23.0 release. What was, was a hack that Debian took out of its man.local file to force SGR escape sequences off in grotty(1). But other distributions, like Arch and its many derivatives, still had it and noticed when it quit working, because they also use the less(1) termcap_XXX environment variable hack (until relatively recently, undocumented) to convert overstriking character sequences into...SGR escape sequences for selecting colors. That was <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/NEWS?h=1.23.0#n552>. It took nearly four months for a hyphen-minus debacle to flare up. Another two and I would have decided I'd managed to duck controversy. > And as for the groff release ... I sure wish we could find another > writer to hire to help us restore some of our wider community coverage. > If you know any likely candidates, do send them our way. Could you update a URL in the article to be more robust? https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/PROBLEMS#n64 But this points to the master branch, so the text at that line number will not be stable over time, and in fact it's not correct for the "PROBLEMS" file in the groff 1.23.0 release. (We managed to fix some problems afterward.) This URL would be better: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/PROBLEMS?h=1.23.0#n82 I also shifted the line address a little to make it more obvious how old this issue really is. Regards, Branden
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