At 2022-07-17T09:18:28-0500, Dave Kemper wrote: > On 7/16/22, G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: > > I think a new, writable troff register would be a better way to > > manipulate this feature--which is basically a style diagnostic--than > > a warning category. > > This suggests that one day there might be other warnings that fall > into the style-diagnostic category, and thus that establishing a > common prefix, maybe "sd*" or "style-", would be helpful to group all > these knobs together.
My sentiments have shifted back to the warning category approach on this
because I have identified two further roff language-level style nits
that it seems worth warning about.
1. Giving a macro a quoted argument without a closing quote.
Example: .MAC foo "bar" "baz
2. Calling a request with the no-break control character when that has
no effect.
Examples: 'nr a 1
'tm this is my error message
It's evidently hard for people to keep the list of requests that imply a
break in their heads, and it's worse for them to suppose changed
behavior when the no-break control character is used when that's not
going to happen. I think doing so can lead a cascade of bad
suppositions about the formatter's behavior.
Our Texinfo manual calls out both of these practices as poor style.
So I will probably allocate some more slots in our precious 32-bit .warn
register to these, and add a pseudo-category "extra" analogous to "all"
and "w".
Names for the individual warning categories are still TBD, as is the
inclusion of "w" in "extra".
This will be post-groff 1.23 release work. Anybody wondering how that
is going should consider subscribing to the bug-groff and/or
groff-commit lists.
> > "sentence." seems too broad and too vague.
>
> True, but with a prefix establishing it as a style diagnostic, a vague
> following term might be OK.
With it back under the umbrella of a warning category, I think it's
easier to get away with the term "sentence".
Regards,
Branden
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