Aw: Re: Aw: Re: mandoc shortcomings

[Carsten Kunze <carsten.kunze%arcor.de@localhost>]

> Sorry - I did not mean to give out incorrect info .. I haven't used it
> and just assumed it would implement std troff, not gnuisms (in troff
> the sequence \*[xx] is the contents of the string register [ followed
> by the three chars "xx]" ...)

These ain't actually gnuisms.  groff has reimplemented these
features from a comercial troff variant (I don't remember the name
at the moment).

> My point was that we should avoid using groffisms to allow the largest
> possible choice of *roff version to be used (I could probably dig up
> a DWB version somewhere!)

NetBSD compatible DWB 3.3 is in pkgsrc (I think).

What is actually a gnuism/groffism is mdoc.  So you need to delete
and rewrite in man format any NetBSD manpage ;)
mdoc had been developed for BSD begin of the 90th but
substantially enhanced by groff.  So current mdoc is definitively
groff's mdoc (also that implemented in mandoc--but mandoc
is not yet 100% compatible, e.g. for .Bl -width "<request>").

DWB doesn't have mdoc at all (latest DWB appeared some
weeks before first mdoc in 1993) and original mdoc can't be
used to format any of today's manpages.

(Heirloom in pkgsrc is rather outdated.  There had been much
work on mdoc and other general roff bug fixes since then.)

Carsten