[groff upstream committer here] I think there is a bit of a culture clash between BSD and the rest of the world here. In man(7) pages a fairly common, though not universal, practice is to use the fourth argument to .TH to designate more or less a package release of a software project. groff itself does this.
BSD by contrast has this "make world" tradition where package versions
tell you a lot less than the bolt of lightning that created the
universe.
I think to fix this _right_ means having a new mdoc(7) macro for
capturing this information. And that in turn probably means having
another knock-down, drag-out argument with Ingo Schwarze, mdocml
maintainer. Since he and I both buy ink by the barrel, I have to ration
my fights with him. :)
But just as a straw man, I'd propose a '.Pj' macro for a
"project/package release", and if this is defined for a page, it goes in
the "footer-inside" position, opposite the page number in the
"footer-outside" position[1]. If .Pj has _not_ been defined, .Os is
used for the "footer-inside".
Maybe I _can_ sell this to Ingo--he wants the whole world to be writing
mdoc(7) instead of man(7) pages, and having a standard way to identify
the origin of a page might offer some slight incentive to people to take
it up.
Thoughts?
Regards,
Branden
[1] groff_mdoc currently gets this wrong; when rendering with
double-sided layout (groff -rD1), the page numbers are incorrectly
placed toward the binding edge rather than the leaf edge.[2]
[2] Discussed a couple of years ago on the groff list, but no mdoc fan
contributed a fix.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2019-01/msg00021.html
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