Update of bug #68719 (group groff):
Summary: [soelim] appends a newline to included files lacking
them, inconsistently with troff => [soelim] .so'ed file without a trailing
newline is handled differently
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Follow-up Comment #2:
I agree with
* the category "Preprocessor soelim"
* the item group "Incorrect behaviour"
* the severity "Minor"
I regard the behaviour as half-undefined. The roff(7) manual in GNU roff
says: "The formatter interprets plain text files employing the Unix
line-ending convention" and according to POSIX, a file is not a "text file"
unless it ends in a newline character. The roff(7) manual in mandoc says:
"roff documents are text files", so we agree so far. Then again, the GNU info
manual explicitly documents what should happen in this edge case, so unless
there are strong reasons to change behaviour *and* documentation - which i
don't really see at this point - not following the manual does qualify as
"Incorrect behaviour." Observing that i regard relying on this behaviour as
somewhat unwise, even in general purpose text processing, does not change that
assessment.
Funnily enough, the mandoc package has the opposite mini-bug. Over there,
mandoc's soelim(1) behaves correctly according to the GNU info manual, whereas
mandoc(1) itself incorrectly inserts an input line break, similar to what GNU
soelim(1) incorrectly does. Not a big deal either because putting anything
below an .so line is very unusual in manual pages, so fixing that mandoc(1)
bug is not a high-priority task.
Then again, if you want to change groff(1) behaviour, arguing that the
traditional and documented behaviour is surprising, error-prone, and heardly
ever useful (maybe except in code obfuscation contests :-), i would hardly
stand in the way.
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