On 4/7/21, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > You didn't indicate how you're invoking the release candidate groff; if > you're using test-groff, you should be aware that this wrapper script > turns on all warnings and backtraces.
So I didn't and so it does. I missed 2017's commit 655e5020. Yes, this is the culprit for what I'm seeing. Although Bjarni authored this change, it doesn't seem to really address his stated concern, which is that some groff warnings are off by default, hiding legitimate problems from users. That's a discussion worth having; the point seems valid, but overturns long-established troff practice. But his change merely establishes multiple sets of defaults for different ways of running groff, which does not seem to improve the situation. In particular, while test-groff's -ww can be overridden on the command line with a later -W, a test-groff user wishing to override the -b option has no mechanism for doing so, short of hacking the script itself. Conversely, if these options are *not* in the script, any test-groff user can activate them with a few keystrokes at the command line. Perhaps it comes back to our earlier discussion (http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?57630) about test-groff's purpose. But it seems more useful as a test script the closer it hews to the way groff actually behaves.
