Follow-up Comment #3, bug #61070 (project groff):
[comment #2 comment #2:] > Even in its most back-compatible mode (-x0), Heirloom troff gives some useful information when .ab is called with no argument Yes, quite a bit of it. > (though it also exits with a 0 status). Yikes! > Whether that's evidence that AT&T troff's bare .ab was a bit more chatty, Version 7 Unix troff definitely was not. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/troff/n5.c (You'll have to search the text, as minnie doesn't show line numbers.) > or that Heirloom's implementers didn't consider historical .ab output sacrosanct, I cannot say I think it's clear that they didn't. V10 Research Unix didn't change much, possibly taking off the period. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/cmd/troff/n5.c DWB 3.3 troff is unchanged in this respect from V10. https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/blob/master/text/troff/n5.c#L435 > -- but I think either one makes the case that we needn't be married to the output groff's .ab currently offers. So it seems. > So "make groff stderr output match Heirloom's" could be yet another option, maybe D1. Yeah, but I'm leaning away from it. I kind of want an .ab that is quiet by default. > B1 and B2 are my least favorites: they add a new request that offers no real new functionality, just tweaks functionality offered by an existing request; and the request they add will be interpreted by strictly conforming historical implementations as ".ab" with the argument "ort" anyway. Good point. > But that's all on purely theoretical grounds; I've never had occasion to use .ab in real life, so I don't have any strong opinion about how it works. I was going to say that it shows up with some frequency in groff's macro packages, but most or all of the cases I see, I had a hand in writing. Oops. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?61070> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/
