Follow-up Comment #9, bug #67992 (group groff): At 2026-01-31T17:25:28-0500, Dave wrote: > Follow-up Comment #6, bug #67992 (group groff): > > [comment #0 original submission:] >> ...but _me_ doesn't seem to. >> >> However there is *copious* evidence that this was always the >> package's intention. > > Sorry if I'm failing to understand your evidence. Those look to me > like evidence that that is how the package is often _used_. What in > those do you see showing _intent_ (of the package author, presumably)?
All of them; none of these are examples of throwaway documents, of the
sort a user might produce when "playing", or exploring the formatter.
Those written by Allman were necessarily composed by a domain expert,
but any shipping with a BSD release, we can reasonably presume, were
intended a meet a professional standard of quality on par with _ms_
documents from the Bell Labs CSRC (and others from the Berkeley CSRG
itself) adumbrating the Unix system.
> This is not to say that the undocumented requirement you've postulated
> is either incorrect or unreasonable. Certainly, in my own use I've
> never found need to jump right into text without setting up headers
> and/or calling a content macro (paragraphing, keep, etc.).
Or setting up a cover page, I reckon, which seems to be the common case
among documents for BSD "SMM" (System Manager's Manual) and "USD"
(User-Supplied Documentation).
I further presume the latter category is where we'd see the most "flex"
in approaches to me(7) document composition, but I'm not finding an
example that overturns my inference about an (unstated) requirement.
> But my understanding of -ms and -mm (gleaned from osmosis rather than
> any study on my part) is that certain requests initialize aspects of
> the package, whereas -me is as initialized as it ever gets merely by
> being included.
You may be right.
> This suggests that, while it's very common to call some -me macro
> before outputting text, it's not required.
And on this point, too.
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