URL: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?66673>
Summary: Fix for bug #66434 breaks a common legacy syntax
Group: GNU roff
Submitter: barx
Submitted: Thu 16 Jan 2025 08:46:46 AM CST
Category: Core
Severity: 3 - Normal
Item Group: Documentation
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 16 Jan 2025 08:46:46 AM CST By: Dave <barx>
The original submission of bug #57538 contains test input to demonstrate the
originally reported problem. The first line of that input now fails in a way
it didn't used to. That line is:
.mso me.tmac \" -me macros
It now produces this warning:
warning: cannot open macro file 'me.tmac ': No such file or directory
This is new within the last six months. I presume it's a consequence of the
fix to bug #66434. Indeed, removing whitespace between the filename and the
comment symbol eliminates the warning.
But I wonder if this was an unintended consequence of that fix. The Texinfo
manual has a big bold *caution* concerning .ds: "The 'ds' request treats the
remainder of the input line as its second argument, including trailing
spaces." This caution is not repeated for .mso and several other requests to
which it now applies. Similarly, the NEWS item for this change states only
that groff "now accepts space characters" in these requests, but doesn't
caution about this very common syntax for appending comments to lines of
code.
So this might be a documentation issue, and that's how I'm initially
classifying this bug report.
But if we approach the functionality from a DWIM standpoint (which, I realize,
is not something troff has historically done), _internal_ spaces in filenames
are common but _trailing_ spaces are not. So perhaps the default parsing
should be to discard trailing space in these requests, especially if that
space is followed by a comment symbol.
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