URL: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?66625>
Summary: [troff] recognize and strip leading neutral double
quote from `tm` request argument
Group: GNU roff
Submitter: gbranden
Submitted: Thu 02 Jan 2025 06:32:51 AM UTC
Category: Core
Severity: 1 - Wish
Item Group: Feature change
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
Planned Release: None
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Follow-up Comments:
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Date: Thu 02 Jan 2025 06:32:51 AM UTC By: G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
We now have a--nearly--completely unified syntax for _troff_ requests that
interpret multi-word arguments.
The `tm` request is a straggler. We could make it consistent with the
others.
* However that would, strictly speaking, be a breaking change with
existing/AT&T _troff_ usage. Anyone who had been using `tm` to emit a message
starting with a " might object.
* On the other hand I expect such usage to have been relatively rare. It's
possible someone was doing so to drive some external cross reference or index
processor. But I've never seen a double quote leading the entire line for
this (or any other `tm` purpose) in the wild.
* Doing this would render _groff_'s `tm1` request redundant. We could
deprecate it and de-document but I think we'd need a really long deprecation
period. Possibly five to ten years.
This would not be hard to do even for _groff 1.24_, but I'm not bent on
getting it in for that release.
Thoughts?
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