On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 12:27:10AM +0100, Christoph Badura wrote:
> > .Nm does not need a dummy argument ("") before punctuation or
> > for correct formatting of the SYNOPSIS any longer.
> 
> I wonder what, exactly, the point of this change is?
> Does this not gratitously obscure that fact that you want the default value
> for macro parameter substituted?  And now you have to remember one more
> special rule about -mdoc macros.

Previously,
.Nm
was replaced by the name.
.Nm ""
did the same, but the "" was only needed if you followed the ""
directly with punctuation, like
.Nm "" ,
because otherwise (that is,
.Nm , )
the name was not printed correctly.

This was a bug in the .Nm macro that has now finally be fixed.

A second bug in .Nm was that in the synopsis argument, it needed an
argument (and "" sufficed without duplicating the actual name in all
places) if you wanted continuation lines to be indented correctly.

I think the "special rule" was that you needed the two quotes in
these two cases, not the way it is now.

> And, besides, doesn't this gratitously
> screw users who want to format -current man-pages on older system where
> the "" *is* required?

Pullup requests for the 1.5 and 1.6 branches have been sent.
 Thomas