At 2026-04-29T14:58:01-0400, Dave wrote: > Update of bug #60233 (group groff): [...] > In addition to the content changes, this patch rebreaks lines > following current convention.[1] Recent commits seem to refer to this > as breaking lines "in a roff-friendly way," but it's really for the > benefit of diff, not roff. (It is following the convention used in > man pages, so "in a man-page-conventional way" would also be accurate. > But a major reason for the man page convention is how it clarifies > content changes in diffs by omitting consequent reflowing, so I feel > diff is at the root of the rationale for it.)
I concur. Future commits of mine adopt new phraseology. > Accordingly, I first rebroke the existing lines, then edited the > wording, then ran a diff between those two steps to show the content > changes my patch makes: "git diff --word-diff" is also helpful for this. > [1] My idea of "current convention" is merely to break lines between > sentences and at logical places within them. If a more specific > convention has been followed thus far (e.g. always break before a > conjunction), this patch should be reflowed again to reflect that. I have nothing more rigid than Kernighan's rule, plus my own habit of breaking "before and after multi-word parentheticals". Texinfo's lack of line continuation (\newline in *roff) makes the rule impossible to follow in some cases, as when using footnotes. (It does technically have that feature, sort of, but you can't use it everywhere--for instance in `@cindex` calls, it doesn't work. Since it doesn't work everywhere I need it to, I haven't arsed myself to learn the rules.) Regards, Branden
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