Re: mksh manpage

[Thorsten Glaser <tg%mirbsd.de@localhost>]

Benny Siegert dixit:

>Any comments on this? Btw, this is on tech-pkg%netbsd.org@localhost.

>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>From: Moritz Wilhelmy <ml+netbsd%wzff.de@localhost>

>The shells/mksh manpage uses custom troff macros (for compatibility
>between different versions of the mdoc(7) package) and looks fairly
>weird, if viewed using man(1).

Does your man(1) use mdocml by default?

Not all manual pages using mdoc macros are mdocml compatible.
I’ve notified the mdocml developers about that right from the
start, before it was included in any OS/distribution at all.
Maybe it should have suitable mechanisms to discern whether
it can handle such a manual page or not.

The existence of a line consisting only of two dots is usually
a good indicator for the presence of custom macros. A line
consisting only of a dot, a backslash and a closing curly brace
(“.\}”) indicates conditional execution.

Most of the manual pages of portable software originating from
here use these, and other, roff functions. They are tested against
AT&T nroff with the UCB macros and GNU nroff with both the UCB
and GNU macros, and usually also GNU groff (ps, converted to PDF).

(While here, could TNF please use \*(Gt instead of \*[Gt] so
their manpages are nroff compatible, since two-character named
references can be written either way?)

>How should this be fixed? Strip the "special stuff" from the manpage and
>add a patch for platforms that need it?

Hell, no! That will break. I’m also using variables that are
interpolated later.

Would it help were I to publish a catmanpage, and maybe a pure
text preformatted manpage, alongside the PDF and HTML formats
already available? They won’t be in the distfile, though.

Other than that, you’ve got the option to use GNU groff or
AT&T nroff, port Plan 9’s *roff, or convince Lucent to give
me a licence to actually use the ditroff tape archive I’ve
got here (the files predate 1990 and don’t have any copyright
notice, but the author is obvious, and since I’m not in the
USA, they’re under copyright protection against me).

I’ve successfully added AT&T nroff to MirBSD and used that
on Interix. Ugly as hell code, needs -O1 and a whole bunch
of other options. Except terminfo(5), due to too many text
block diversions, it works fine with at most minor bugs.
It’s under the Caldera licence of 2001-2002. You might want
to only use it as fallback option.

HTH & HAND,
//mirabilos
-- 
13:37⎜«Natureshadow» Deep inside, I hate mirabilos. I mean, he's a good
guy. But he's always right! In every fsckin' situation, he's right. Even
with his deeply perverted taste in software and borked ambition towards
broken OSes - in the end, he's damn right about it :(! […] works in mksh