At 2024-11-24T23:04:23-0600, Dave Kemper wrote: > Every time I look at a diff in groff.texi, and I have to spend some > time figuring out what *actually* changed versus what merely got > reflowed, I wish that that manual used manpage-style line breaking > internally.
You might be interested in or amused by a recent patch series to GNU Bash, starting here: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2024-11/msg00161.html > Is there a reason for it not to, besides historical practice? Not to my knowledge. > Going through the entire manual and changing its format would be a > slog (though perhaps at least partly automatable), and would make "git > blame" useless for tracking down any particular change from before > that point--but might make diffs after that point enough easier to > follow to be a net win. > > Alternately, everyone[1] who hacks on the manual could agree to use > the new format for any future edits. This would make the formatting > change more gradual and manageable, but would also result in > inconsistent line-breaking style within the manual for, realistically, > decades (or at least until AI takes over all content creation, and no > humans need use groff ever again). This, too, might be worth > tolerating for the readability of diffs going forward. > > [1] Yeah, "everyone" is pretty much just Branden, credited for 1255 of > the 1272 commits in the last five years (and even that is an > undercount, as several of those commits are credited to me but > actually applied and sometimes refined by Branden). I happen to have a change pending to our Texinfo manual. I'll pilot this and see what happens. (It _does_ happen to warrant a parallel change to one of our man pages.) Regards, Branden
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