Follow-up Comment #1, bug #57485 (project groff):
I'd like to stress that this patch indeed fixes a bug. In 4.4BSD,
it was *not* documented that .Dd requires exactly three arguments
and prints the current date otherwise, but several manual pages
existed that gave a single quoted argument of the form "Month day,
year". Documenting the weird behaviour of the groff_mdoc(7) macros
was done much later. The mandoc(1) utility has been providing the
more useful behaviour proposed here for years, in a way that is in
particular compatible with the original 4.4BSD manual pages, and
it has been documenting the more useful behaviour for years, too.
So calling the current groff_mdoc(7) behaviour "documented behaviour"
is misleading. At some point, a bug was documented instead of fixed
in groff, a bug that broke the formatting of even the original 4.4BSD
manuals, i.e. those of the system where these macros came from.
To clarify two minor details:
Losing unbreakable spaces is totally irrelevant. For any sane
input, the footer line is always a single line only; no linebreaks
occur.
Of course this ticket only applies to the non-Mdocdate case,
nothing changes for Mdocdate.
_______________________________________________________
Reply to this item at:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?57485>
_______________________________________________
Message sent via Savannah
https://savannah.gnu.org/
