Follow-up Comment #18, bug #50770 (group groff): Hi Dave,
Our ideas about backward compatibility are probably quite close.
> What he suggests seems akin to saying a compiler, in order to be backward
compatible, must produce the same executable from version to version. This
philosophy would forestall any new optimizations a new version of a compiler
might be able to make.
I have no problem with improvements to the compiler, but I would be annoyed
if, when I compiled my program after installing the new version, its output
had changed when I ran my program. Applying this to roff - groff compiles (and
then runs) my document (the source code) and output is produced. Backward
compatibility should mean that the output from both versions should be the
same. Output in this sense is whatever gets printed or viewed on the screen.
This is most important for troff produced output since we know that some of
our users take a lot of time to make their output look as good as possible, it
is probably less important for output destined for a terminal.
An example is if you compare the sizes of the mom/examples pdfs produced by
1.23.0 and current HEAD they are much smaller, because of improvements to
gropdf, but if you "output" the pdfs they look identical.
Anyway, you have persuaded me that the chances of this change affecting a
significant number of existing documents is small, so I have no objection, but
I hope you understand my definition of backward compatibility is restricted to
the typographical output produced. How it is produced can change, or new
features added. I am not so much a luddite as you think. :-)
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