"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> writes:
> That's one potential lesson. Another is that maintainers of
> man(7)-generation tools are jealous of "stylesheet"-level issues, and
> don't want readers of man pages fooling with them. I imagine that
> highly paid web site designers feel the same way about Stylus...[1]
I don't think you understand why we keep having these conversations.
Apart from one thing I noticed while I was still reading the groff list,
and which you convinced me didn't affect as many man pages as I had
thought, every time we've had one of these chats, it's because the
following sequence of events have happened:
(a) You made some change to how man pages are rendered that broke
something people cared about.
(b) My users noticed way before I did and reported that to me as a bug.
(c) I reached out to you to try to figure out what's going on and how to
fix it.
This *keeps happening*, which is why you're getting a more and more blunt
version of me each time it happens.
You think this is me being jealous of stylesheet-level issues or not
wanting *readers* fooling with them? I have been using the new version of
groff for months and didn't even notice the change. I got involved because
it broke things for other people who use pod2man, who then reported it to
me. Those are the writers and readers of the documents your software is
formatting, go argue with them. Don't blame me for your users not liking
your changes, let alone imply it's some sort of power trip on my part.
I am not objecting to *readers* of man pages fooling with them, I am
objecting to *you* fooling with the rendering in ways that my users
consider to be bugs. If you would stop doing things that people notice and
consider broken, I would literally never notice and we would not be having
these extended discussions.
In any case, we've now reached the point where I can either argue with you
in detail or maintain podlators but I literally don't have enough hours in
the day to do both.
I honestly regret that because, despite my tone, I do like these
conversations, at least in part. Every time we have one, I learn
something, and in the right mood it's sort of enjoyable to play the game
of "can I write a message phrased carefully enough that Branden can't find
sloppy wording to object to." You would make an excellent copy editor
(meant sincerely, and complimentarily). But every one of these discussions
takes me at least ten hours, and right now I simply do not have another
ten hours to spend.
So, here's what I'm going to do:
I'm reverting the change to podlators to override the TS register and
changing the relevant block in the Pod::Man documentation to =over 5 for
several reasons:
1. As a gesture of good will because I really don't want to be fighting
with you, and I do want you to feel like I respect your technical
judgement (because I do!).
2. After looking at the rendering of perlfunc, I see your point about
hanging paragraphs and agree that it's at least arguable that the
current approach is *too* cuddled.
3. None of my users have complained to me about this yet (because they've
not been exposed to the new behavior yet). It's just something I
noticed while switching from .IP to .TP, so I am in that sense
borrowing trouble, and I don't want to do that.
The tag spilling is minor and arguably more correct in at least some
cases, so I'll document this in the Changes and see if anyone notices or
objects. If no one does, great! If they do, I'll decide then whether the
right thing for me to do is to override the default or do something else.
After I get done with that, I'll release the new version of podlators and
then see about getting it into Perl. I don't know when that will happen,
and when that version of Perl will get into Debian, so that doesn't
immediately resolve this bug. But that's all that I can do, at least at
the moment, to try to push it towards a resolution.
--
Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
