Follow-up Comment #3, bug #66410 (group groff): gbranden:
> At the time mdoc was designed, it seems that purpose
This part of your argument is bogus.
The .Lb macro did not exist when mdoc was designed.
It did not even exist in the 4.4BSD-Lite2 (June 1995) version of mdoc(7).
It has nothing to do with (CSRG) BSD. For example, OpenBSD still does not use
it at all.
It appears it was invented in NetBSD in 1998, likely by Perry E. Metzger:
doc-syms revision 1.30
date: 1998-02-05 18:35:18 +0000; author: perry; state: Exp; lines: +24
-1;
add .Lb directive for use in LIBRARY sections. Ought to document this.
FreeBSD adopted it in 2000:
Author: phantom <phan...@freebsd.org>
Date: Fri Apr 21 09:35:43 2000 +0000
Introduce new mdoc macro -- Lb. It will be used to define library
ownership
for function. For example: for stat(2) syscall (owned by libc) we will
add
following code:
.Sh LIBRARY
.Lb libc
and it will be rendered to:
LIBRARY
Standard C Library (libc, -lc)
Suggested by: mpp
Idea obtained from: NetBSD
So adopting it was suggested by Mike Pritchard and implemented by Alexey
Zelkin.
Werner Lemberg then included it in his mdoc rewrite for groff-1.17, commit
058f72af (Fri Mar 23 00:17:52 2001 +0000),
see also the entry in the groff NEWS file.
I certainly agree that .Lb is ill-designed in several ways, but Cynthia is
blameless.
For comparison, portable mandoc warns, but OpenBSD mandoc does not:
$ echo .Lb libxxx | ./mandoc -mdoc -T lint
mandoc: <stdin>:1:5: WARNING: unknown library name: Lb libxxx
[...]
$ echo .Lb libxxx | mandoc -mdoc -T lint | grep unkn
$
I think the best option is to not use this ill-designed macro and to not warn
about it.
The only reason i haven't deleted the warning from portable mandoc is that
FreeBSD and NetBSD disagree with me in so far as they still want to use the
macro. I don't know how they feel about the warning, though. I don't recall
that they ever complained about the warning, but that doesn't necessarily mean
that they would object to getting rid of the warning.
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