Follow-up Comment #14, bug #67363 (group groff): Russ replied to the "bug-groff" mailing list, where his email is held pending moderation.
And I can't get to the moderation interface because "lists.gnu.org" is timing
out (possibly due to DDoS attack/AI intake bot mining).
So here's his reply: henceforth this is really Russ writing.
"G. Branden Robinson" <invalid.nore...@gnu.org> writes:
>> I think I have two options for the upcoming podlators 6.0.0 release:
>> * Do nothing. Justification will be broken with groff 1.23 and fixed with
>> groff 1.24, which will hopefully make it into the trixie release.
>> * Add ".if n .ds AD l" to the preamble, and leave ".if n .ad l" after .TH
>> as is. This will make the formatting work everywhere the way that it
>> historically has (although will get pod2man output no closer to
>> supporting AD properly) and means that the time frame for groff 1.24
>> becomes irrelevant to podlators, at the cost of an additional line in
>> every generated man page.
[...]
> I think Russ went with option (2), which is good because sure enough
> _groff_ 1.24.0 is not available for inclusion in Debian trixie
> (scheduled for 9 August 2025).
Correct. podlators v6.0.0 and later now add ".if n .ds AD l" to every
generated page.
> My plan is for (1) _groff_'s _man_ (and _mdoc_) packages to check at
> package initialization time for defined `AD` string (and defined `HY`
> register). **If these exist**, they necessarily represent the user's
> preferences (since they weren't read from a document) and are each
> copied to a shared private name (prefixed with "andoc*" to communicate
> this shared status; (2) upon encountering any new _man_ document at a
> `TH` macro call, or new _mdoc_ document at a `Dd` macro call, these
> saved user preferences are reasserted to configure the document's
> rendering, and existing `AD` and `HY` objects removed; (3) page-local
> assignments of `AD` and `HY` continue to be honored as before, and (4)
> at every new section, subsection, and paragraph, adjustment and
> hyphenation modes are reset to the page's preference if configured and
> the user's otherwise.
I like the combination of (1) and (2) as a solution for this problem and
agree that this should work with podlators. I think the important part for
podlators going forward, given this behavior, is to make sure that the
".if n .ds AD l" line stays in the preamble (in other words, before .TH)
so that groff can reassert user preferences at .TH and not be confused
with (3). That's easy enough (and natural) to do.
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