"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> writes:

> Here's my method.[1]

> 1.  Grab all the ".pod" files installed on my Debian bookworm(-ish) box.
> 2.  Run them through _current_ podlators pod2man,[2] _with_ groff Git
>     HEAD, but with the `cflags 0 "` line in "tmac/an.tmac" commented
>     out, disabling adjustment at the command line, and saving standard
>     output and standard error.  This captures the "status quo ante".
> 3.  Uncomment the `cflags 0 "` line.
> 4.  Run the same file through _current_ podlators pod2man again, saving
>     standard output and standard error.  This captures the effect of my
>     reckless and dangerous change.  ;-)
> 5.  Diff 'em.

[snip]

Ah! Okay, you caught instances that I didn't because I suspect there were
no quotes most of your examples other than the first in the POD source (I
think those are blocks in C<>), which found a bunch of places where the
changed behavior does catch cases where there are periods inside quotes.
I'm assuming most of these cases are ones where the end of the line in the
input happens immediately after the C<> block.

I think I'm convinced that overall your change makes slightly better. I
still don't like that it breaks the ability of someone who is
intentionally ending a sentence with `."` to get correct results, but as
previously mentioned, line spacing in *roff output from POD is in practice
such a mess that I doubt many people will notice. So given that, I can't
really make a good argument against your incremental improvement.

I'll update the Pod::Man documentation to explain that getting consistent
end of line spacing from POD converted to *roff is probably not going to
be universally possible unless one uses Unicode quotes, but that you'll
probably also not notice the occasional errors since they're fairly rare.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

              • ... G. Branden Robinson
              • ... Russ Allbery
              • ... G. Branden Robinson
          • ... Russ Allbery
            • ... G. Branden Robinson
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  • Re: " vs... Alejandro Colomar via GNU roff typesetting system discussion

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