On 2016-09-28 00:10, Ingo Schwarze wrote:> The patch also inserts a few needless .PP before .SH, but that does > no harm. mdoc2man.awk is a terrible hack and not a proper parser > in the first place, so we shouldn't expect beauty in its output. > If the output is correct and portable, that's good enough. At some > point, we should replace mdoc2man.awk with mandoc -Tman anyway. > The last time i tried, there was still some work to do, so that > won't be instantaneous.At least on Linux systems, wouldn't using man/groff's built-in mdoc support also be good enough? -- Mantas Mikul?nas <grawity at gmail.com>
Hi, Mantas Mikul??nas wrote on Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 06:51:18PM +0300:> At least on Linux systems, wouldn't using man/groff's built-in mdoc > support also be good enough?Yes. Jakub Jelen of Redhat reported that the bug didn't affect Fedora. I don't know for sure, but i guess that was because they install mdoc(7) rather than man(7) versions of the manuals. In any case, installing mdoc(7) versions would seem reasonable to me on any Linux distribution. However, i have seen at least one case where a senior developer of a major Linux distro insisted on installing man(7) rather than mdoc(7) versions even though the mdoc(7) versions are the master and the man(7) versions autogenerated from them: Bdale Garbee when packaging sudo(8) for Debian. I don't know why, though; preferring man(7) doesn't seem to make sense to me. Also, it doesn't appear to be a strict policy there; on a Debian system i have access to, i see many mdoc(7) manuals in /usr/share/man/. That said, the mdoc2man conversion tool in the OpenSSH build system ought to be maintained because there are archaic operating systems out there (for example commercial Solaris 11) that still don't have mdoc(7) support in man(1) by default. Yours, Ingo
On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 07:03:27PM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:> However, i have seen at least one case where a senior developer > of a major Linux distro insisted on installing man(7) rather than > mdoc(7) versions even though the mdoc(7) versions are the master > and the man(7) versions autogenerated from them: Bdale Garbee > when packaging sudo(8) for Debian. I don't know why, though; > preferring man(7) doesn't seem to make sense to me. Also, it > doesn't appear to be a strict policy there; on a Debian system > i have access to, i see many mdoc(7) manuals in /usr/share/man/.The Debian OpenSSH packages just install mdoc(7). I have no idea why Bdale did that; I would guess it to be a response to some particular difficulty or other rather than a distribution policy, the latter of which it certainly is not. In any case, the current sudo packages in Debian unstable install mdoc(7) pages. -- Colin Watson [cjwatson at debian.org]