On Sat, Feb 22, 2025 at 4:24 PM onf <o...@disroot.org> wrote: > The combination of points 1, 5, and 5b seems to imply that > .nx nx \" load file nx > > will be interpretted as loading file 'nx ' (without the quotes).
Correct. I opened http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?66673 in response to this observation about the .mso request, which spawned the NEWS item you quoted. The tl;dr of #66673 is that the break in back compatibility was considered an acceptable cost given the benefit of the vastly larger number of files that can now be specified in groff input. I still suspect that that benefit stands even if the file-opening function is modified to chop trailing spaces from the name. That would prevent groff from opening a file named "trailing space ", but any real-world files with such names are probably either typos or attempts to do something underhanded. Such a change would also create nonorthogonality between how requests .ds and .nx operate, but I think creating groff strings with trailing spaces can be useful, while opening files with them rarely-to-the-point-of-never is. Ultimately I considered the back-compatibility breakage to be minor and easily rectified, so I didn't push for this change.
