Follow-up Comment #2, bug #66625 (group groff): At 2025-01-03T00:17:57-0500, Dave wrote: > Follow-up Comment #1, bug #66625 (group groff): > > [comment #0 original submission:] >> I've never seen a double quote leading the entire line for this >> (or any other `tm` purpose) in the wild. > > If there's one takeaway from some of the most contentious post-1.23 > debates, it may be that what you've seen in the wild represents only a > fraction of the wilderness.
That's true. We could always use more test coverage.
> I don't feel strongly either way about the proposal itself, but since
> there's already a request that does exactly what you propose to make
> .tm do, I see little urgency in it either.
Agreed. The point here is not to increase GNU troff's feature set, but
its consistency, for ease of acquisition and use, so that people don't
have to learn a special case.
> Perhaps the first cut could be to throw a warning if someone uses a "
> at the beginning of a .tm message, and see whether anyone notices.
I thought about that but decided against it, because I don't want to
disincentivize adoption of the "newly correct" syntax.
That is, since these messages go only to stderr, some users may be
insensitive to whether a noisy leading `"` appears or not. (Granted, it
would probably drive _me_ up the wall.) The idea is that people could
pre-migrate, and then in groff 1.2x, their preparations would be
rewarded by suddenly correct output. So I don't want to grief them now
with a warning that will just go away with no effort on their part.
Warnings are intended for things you likely want to fix.
(Incidentally, I need to check how `ab` behaves in this respect.)
But I admit, I don't know of another way to incentivize our users to
actually communicate with us on this point.
_______________________________________________________
Reply to this item at:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?66625>
_______________________________________________
Message sent via Savannah
https://savannah.gnu.org/
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
