Hi Dave, On Sun Feb 23, 2025 at 12:59 AM CET, Dave Kemper wrote: > On Sat, Feb 22, 2025 at 4:24 PM onf <o...@disroot.org> wrote: > > The combination of points 1, 5, and 5b seems to imply that > > .nx nx \" load file nx > > > > will be interpretted as loading file 'nx ' (without the quotes). > > Correct. I opened http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?66673 in response to > this observation about the .mso request, which spawned the NEWS item > you quoted. > > The tl;dr of #66673 is that the break in back compatibility was > considered an acceptable cost given the benefit of the vastly larger > number of files that can now be specified in groff input. > > I still suspect that that benefit stands even if the file-opening > function is modified to chop trailing spaces from the name. That > would prevent groff from opening a file named "trailing space ", but > any real-world files with such names are probably either typos or > attempts to do something underhanded. Such a change would also create > nonorthogonality between how requests .ds and .nx operate, but I think > creating groff strings with trailing spaces can be useful, while > opening files with them rarely-to-the-point-of-never is.
I wholeheartedly agree with your last paragraph. > Ultimately I considered the back-compatibility breakage to be minor > and easily rectified, so I didn't push for this change. What I was trying to bring attention to is that it will also likely increase the fragmentation between groff and other troffs. Just to make this clear before Branden starts claiming the opposite, I won't mind too much if this change ends up in groff as it's currently being proposed. I would just find it unfortunate, because I am pretty sure neatroff won't adopt it as it currently stands. ~ onf
