Hi Werner, Werner LEMBERG wrote on Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 07:45:47AM +0100: > Ingo Schwarze wrote: >> Branden Robinson wrote:
>>> Also consistently double-quote multi-word arguments to the .SH >>> macro, for consistency with the rest of the page and (most) other >>> groff man pages. >> That's both useless and harmless - in a word, cargo cult. > I disagree. Just imagine that you have a title with more than nine > words: To be able to display it correctly on old non-groff systems you > *must* use double quotes. For this reason I recommend to always use > double quotes, which will never cause a problem. Oh, i no longer considered that point because in BSD manual pages, compatibity with formatters having the historic argument limitation was generally dropped about eight years ago, so using such old formatters is no longer viable for modern manual page display. > In other words, I prefer to have users apply a recipe that will always > work. Telling them `Always quote a multi-word title' is IMHO easier > to remember than saying `Use quotes if you have more than nine words > in a title'. Fair enough, this one does little harm. But other similar recommendations that would be required to keep stuff working with historic formatters are bad ideas, in particular in mdoc(7), like "always use Xo after It" (don't recommend that!), so i'm not sure what the point is in advocating some compat practices that are easy to follow but dropping others that would cause serious ugliness and complication in the manual page source code. > Perhaps a future release of groff can completely drop compatibility to > old non-groff systems, but I guess this won't happen in the > forthcoming version. I think it is high time to no longer require authors to write modern manual pages in such a way that they work on systems from decades ago. Compatibility is about making sure that historic documents can be formatted with modern formatters, not the other way round: the inverse would impede progress and put undue burden on manual page authors. Yours, Ingo
