On Sat, Nov 2, 2024 at 5:08 AM G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > At 2024-11-01T21:07:29+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > > No, this isn't outdated, since that reduces the quality of the diff. > > Also, I review a lot of patches in the mail client, without running > > git(1). And it's not just for reviewing diffs, but also for writing > > them. Semantic newlines reduce the amount of work for producing the > > diffs. > > It's a real win for diffs. > > Here's a very recent example from groff. > > diff --git a/man/groff.7.man b/man/groff.7.man > index 1fb635f2b..1d248b237 100644 > --- a/man/groff.7.man > +++ b/man/groff.7.man > @@ -1281,6 +1281,7 @@ .SH Identifiers > typeface, > color, > special character or character class, > +hyphenation language code, > environment, > or stream.
Every time I look at a diff in groff.texi, and I have to spend some time figuring out what *actually* changed versus what merely got reflowed, I wish that that manual used manpage-style line breaking internally. Is there a reason for it not to, besides historical practice? Going through the entire manual and changing its format would be a slog (though perhaps at least partly automatable), and would make "git blame" useless for tracking down any particular change from before that point--but might make diffs after that point enough easier to follow to be a net win. Alternately, everyone[1] who hacks on the manual could agree to use the new format for any future edits. This would make the formatting change more gradual and manageable, but would also result in inconsistent line-breaking style within the manual for, realistically, decades (or at least until AI takes over all content creation, and no humans need use groff ever again). This, too, might be worth tolerating for the readability of diffs going forward. [1] Yeah, "everyone" is pretty much just Branden, credited for 1255 of the 1272 commits in the last five years (and even that is an undercount, as several of those commits are credited to me but actually applied and sometimes refined by Branden).
