Hi! On Sat, 2019-07-13 at 23:46:23 +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > Guillem Jover wrote on Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 08:15:18PM +0200: > > I've got some man pages using the man package, which I've been > > converting to mdoc. > > I'm curious, which ones?
The man pages for the Debian GNU inetutils package, as upstream only provides texinfo documents, and even switched from the original BSD man pages (from where the code originated) to stub and unhelpful man pages generated from --help output, a change which I reverted. The conversion for the last remaining ones is here: <https://git.hadrons.org/cgit/debian/pkgs/inetutils.git/commit/?id=6323b846cfc7b511c9911c4dc21aebb7f86d36f5> I've considered switching others where I'm upstream, such as dpkg, although I've found annoyances like this (or dates not being settable in ISO 8601 format, or po4a giving translators too much confusing markup), that have put me off. (My current thinking has been to switch from man to perl POD for those, and even though POD is less semantically rich than mdoc, it does not have the above mentioned problems, and seems like an incremental "improvement" from man markup.) > > But I've been struggling to find an equivalent for the .TQ macro > > in mdoc, in the docs (groff and BSDs), and via search engines. > > > > Is there anything at all within mdoc which I'm missing? How do BSDs > > handle things like: > > > > ,--- > > .TP > > .BR \-o ", " \-\-option > > .TQ > > .BR \-a ", " \-\-alias > > Do whatever. > > \&... this is the end of the preceding text. > .Pp > .Bl -tag -width Ds -compact > .It Fl o , -option > .It Fl a , -alias > Do whatever. > .Pp > .It Fl n , -next > Next list entry. > .El > .Pp > And here the running text continues ... > > https://man.openbsd.org/mdoc.7#Bl_2 # end of the second paragraph Thanks, although I don't think this is entirely equivalent. :) The nice thing about .TQ is that it gives you compact for the continued entries, but not for the rest, so it's visually clear which ones go together. Just listing them w/o -commpat (which is what I went with for now) seems ugly/confusing to me, as it's not clear at first sight that these are related, and using -compact for the whole list is not visually appealing for this specific case (I've used -compact in other cases where it looked appropriate, such as <https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libbsd/tree/man/libbsd.7#n93>). > Btw., note that .Bl -compact is portable, whereas .TQ is a GNU > extension: the -compact flag has been around since the early 1990ies, > whereas groff only supports .TQ since 2007. > > https://man.openbsd.org/4.4BSD-Lite2/man7/mdoc.samples.7#tag Right, although I'm not too fused about these (it being a GNU extension, and it's age) for the cases where I use .TQ. So, I take there's no direct equivalent then? :) I guess I could file a request somewhere, but I'm assuming something like this would need to be coordinated among the various implementations? Thanks, Guillem
