Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de>:
> To do that, i first have to try and rehash Eric's plan,
> hoping this will be an adequate summary:
>
> (1) narrowing and simplifying the man markup language, decoupling it
> from groff peculiarities (without going into much detail yet
> which idioms exactly to discourage, and what in partiular to
> replace them with - probably idioms from (2) in most cases)
>
> (2) maybe introduce a small number of additional semantic macros
> to man(7), or maybe (likely?) what's in man_ext now may be
> enough extension already (without going into much detail yet
> what might or might not still be missing)
>
> (3) scan existing packages for usage conflicting with (1),
> contacting maintainers and politely explaining to them
> what is problematic about it, what the downsides for their
> users are, and how they can improve user experience by
> modernizing documentation markup, sometimes even providing
> patches (note that (3) lies outside the scope of groff
> development)
That is a fair summary. I would add two points:
1) I don't intend to guess about which low-level requests to banish -
instead I'll do a frequency count on an entire man tree in Ubuntu
and look at what requests can be disallowed without pushing the
level of breakage above 3% or so.
2) At some point, I expect to implement a hygiene mode that will actually
disable those requests in man(7). There will be grumbling...
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
