Follow-up Comment #16, bug #60061 (group groff): At 2025-12-23T16:36:44-0500, Dave wrote: > Follow-up Comment #8, bug #67838 (group groff): > > [comment #7 comment #7:] >> that's the objective of the now-closed-as-Duplicate bug #67082. > > We seem to be reading that ticket through different lenses. To me, > its objective was fixing a couple of misdirected Prev/Next links in > the manual, both of which (and many others) are now covered by the > patch here.
Okay, well, I'm happy to see that objective met regardless.
>> a concrete presentation of a "full-service" macro package is
>> valuable to ground the reader concretely in the functions that
>> such a package must serve.
>
> I'm not sure the manual should single out one macro package as the
> standard to illustrate higher-level functions.
That's not what I'm trying to do. I see two alternatives:
1. Don't do it at all;
2. Present a comparative analysis of how ms, mm, me, mom, man, and mdoc
each meet the demands explored in Chapter 3.
#2 is more work than I care to bite off, maybe ever, but certainly
before I've met the more meat-and-potatoes objective of revising the
material on character resolution and properties and on "grout".
Further, the status quo is useful for pedagogical purposes, in giving
the reader something concrete to latch on to when presenting
typographical concepts.
Presenting one actually existing macro package has at least two
advantages over presenting many in parallel or presenting one
hypothetical package.
A. We lower the risk of bewildering the reader with the minutia of
differences among packages.
B. Examples grounded in an actually existing macro package can be test
for correctness. A hypothetical package always behaves ideally, at
the cost of not being usable to produce documents.
Incidentally I note that Chapter 3 is based on Allman's "meintro.me"
document and frankly acknowledges its provenance. If I were an ms(7)
partisan seeking me(7)'s erasure, I would have rewritten that chapter to
avoid mentioning this fact.
> I don't claim my path to roff competency is typical or representative,
> but starting with Allman's -me manual served me well before I ever
> needed to delve into lower-level functions, and I'm sure the -ms
> manual can serve that purpose apart from the Texinfo manual just as
> well as within it. In fact, for a long time I found the -ms chapter
> to be clutter returning useless results when searching the manual for
> something, until I learned to effectively excise it.
I'm not trying to favor ms(7) over me(7). I doubt it's escaped your
notice that I've tended to spend more of my time on mm(7) and man(7)
(and mdoc(7)) than on ms(7). In fact I think I've spent more time on
me(7) than on ms(7).[1][2]
What alternative approach would you propose that doesn't forfeit any of
the pedagogical benefits I've enumerated above?
For background, I recommend
[https://wolfram.schneider.org/bsd/7thEdManVol2/learn/learn.pdf Kernighan's
paper on the Seventh Edition Unix learn(1) system].
While that _program_ seems to have died so completely that no one (to
my knowledge) has resurrected it in clone form, I find most of his
observations about teaching to be sound.
Regards,
Branden
[1]
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?go_report=Apply&group=groff&func=browse&set=custom&msort=0&report_id=225&advsrch=0&bug_id=&submitted_by=0&status_id=3&severity=0&category_id=124&assigned_to=108747&summary=&bug_group_id=0&resolution_id=1&plan_release_id=0&history_search=0&history_field=0&history_event=modified&history_date_dayfd=24&history_date_monthfd=12&history_date_yearfd=2025&max_rows=50&spamscore=5&boxoptionwanted=1#options
[2]
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?go_report=Apply&group=groff&func=browse&set=custom&msort=0&report_id=225&advsrch=0&bug_id=&submitted_by=0&status_id=3&severity=0&category_id=120&assigned_to=108747&summary=&bug_group_id=0&resolution_id=1&plan_release_id=0&history_search=0&history_field=0&history_event=modified&history_date_dayfd=24&history_date_monthfd=12&history_date_yearfd=2025&max_rows=50&spamscore=5&boxoptionwanted=1#options
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