Update of bug #65692 (group groff):
Status: None => Rejected
Assigned to: None => gbranden
Open/Closed: Open => Closed
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Follow-up Comment #1:
Speaking as the de facto maintainer of _groff mdoc_, exact parity with
_mandoc_ output is not a goal for me.
> The output of 'mandoc' should have priority
I completely disagree. Among other factors, _groff mdoc_ long predates the
_mdocml_ project.
As another point, a formatter should render _man_ and _mdoc_ documents
similarly. I'll return to this point below.
> This is to facilitate the comparison of the output of files with
the 'mandoc' requests.
I do this routinely when preparing patches to the _bash_, _ncurses_, and
_procps_ man pages. I don't diff _groff_ (_nroff_) output against _mandoc_'s,
though--what I do is check that my _changes_ (to the man page content) behave
as expected. If they don't, I investigate what. In principle, I could
uncover a bug in either implementation this way.
This ticket is effectively demanding extremely strict specification of _mdoc_
output, something that I feel was not contemplated by its author, Cynthia
Livingston (though I'm open to correction on this point by Ingo Schwarze, who
has been in contact with her about _mdoc_ history).
Extremely strict specifications take a lot of effort to prepare validation
mechanisms for; worse, they limit the flexibility of implementers to solve
problems, particularly when facing conjunctions of language features that the
designers did not contemplate. _mdoc_ is a large, complex language and I do
not believe its author or maintainers have the superhuman insight necessary to
foresee all possible valid inputs.
Further, because _man_ and _mdoc_ documents should render similarly, any
unspecified point of _mdoc_ rendering will get decided and possibly applied to
_man_ output as well. So what you are proposing is that _groff_ slavishly
follow _mandoc_'s choices not only for _mdoc_ but for _man_ as well.
While I'm sure that prospect would excite _mandoc_'s more obnoxious partisans
to the point of ecstasy, I find it totally unacceptable.
The suggestions in your bug reports would greatly improve in quality if you
considered anything but their most immediate and obvious consequences.
Closing as rejected.
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