On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 03:16:02PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Sean M Burke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > But anyway, I sense that I'm missing something here, because of my > > almost complete lack of familiarity with *roff: It it merely a cosmetic > > thing whether a Pod formatter leaves an unadorned "foo(1)" as is, or > > puts it in an appropriate style for a man cross-reference? Or are there > > grander non-cosmetic ramifications?
Yes, in my opinion. It's not always a man page reference. People sometimes write things like name(s) (ie meaning name/names) and that jars when typeset as a man page reference. It jars enough to be briefly confusing. There is at least 1 RFC for perl6 that "suffers" from this auto-formatting. > It's purely cosmetic, but not having it is... strange. It's the sort of > thing that one does if one wants to generate manual pages, rather than > documentation that happens to be written using the -man macro set. :) > > At least that's my opinion. > > But that isn't really a persuasive argument against not requiring people > wrap it with L<>, which isn't particularly difficult to do. Considering that I don't know of a way to stop pod2foo guesswork formatting, but I know I can force formatting with L<>, then needing explicit formatting seems like the better solution. However, if there's some easy way to override guesswork with simple pod, then my objection to guesswork formatting is moot, and I'm neutral on whether it's net lazier to have it on (more markup saved than anti-markup needed) or off (vice versa) Nicholas Clark -- Even better than the real thing: http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/
