Hi,
Alejandro Colomar wrote on Wed, Jan 08, 2025 at 09:32:25PM +0100:
> So, let's break the line before the first parameter if it would overrun
> the right margin (-rLL=NNn), and automagically calculate an appropriate
> indentation for the first parameter.
Sounds better, but still not like a fully thought-through analysis of the
problem. For example, it's not necessarily the first argument that is
long. Consider this real-world example from an actual manual page:
void
SSL_CTX_sess_set_remove_cb(SSL_CTX *ctx,
void (*remove_session_cb)(SSL_CTX *ctx, SSL_SESSION *));
By the way, in mdoc(7), writing that is totally straightforward
for documentation author:
.Ft void
.Fo SSL_CTX_sess_set_remove_cb
.Fa "SSL_CTX *ctx"
.Fa "void (*remove_session_cb)(SSL_CTX *ctx, SSL_SESSION *)"
.Fc
The mdoc(7) language automatically breaks the line before the long
argument, even though it's the second one, and proceed with an
indentation of 4n.
> As for the right indentation, I'd make it the exact indentation that
> would make the first parameter touch the right margin,
Probably, simply always using 4n would look better and more uniform.
With flush-right, you might get very large indentations that look
weird. Besides, KISS! - especially considering that name+argument
overflow is an unusual edge case in the first place.
Also, while indentation conventions vary among projects (for example,
BSD uses 8n tabs for statements and 4n for continuations of the same
statement on the next line, whereas groff source code tends to use 2n
troughout IIUC), using flush-right in source code formatting feels
very unusual to me.
> with a minimum indentation of 2n (being such a rare case, I'd hardcode
> this value; it shouldn't be hit under normal conditions).
If you really want to make the indentation variable in this special
case of name+argument overrun (rather than just using 4n), then
constraining it in the range from 2n to 8n inclusive would make
sense to me because i would consider tab settings outside that
range highly unusual in any source code formatting convention.
Yours,
Ingo
