Re: RFC: Synopsis syntax change in nft.8

2017-08-11 Thread Phil Sutter
On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 12:44:25AM +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote: > On Thursday 2017-08-10 20:29, Phil Sutter wrote: [...] > >What do you think? > > The styling _is_ written down: The Linux man-pages project has, since Tue May > 22 2007, a man-pages.7 file. It says: bold="as-is text",

Re: RFC: Synopsis syntax change in nft.8

2017-08-11 Thread Phil Sutter
On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 11:55:03PM +0200, Florian Westphal wrote: > FWIW I am not a docbook fan so I would not mind if we switch to > another markup system. I'd prefer to write directly in roff as well. Doing so would also eliminate the dependency to docbook (which I had problems with when

Re: RFC: Synopsis syntax change in nft.8

2017-08-10 Thread Jan Engelhardt
On Friday 2017-08-11 00:44, Jan Engelhardt wrote: >Some history for the mail archives: {} is not specified, but follows from >prominent use of | inside [] and the desire to have some kind of grouping for >non-optional things. I will — cautiously — claim that {} was an idea of mine >(barring any

Re: RFC: Synopsis syntax change in nft.8

2017-08-10 Thread Jan Engelhardt
On Thursday 2017-08-10 20:29, Phil Sutter wrote: > >With no prior knowlege of how this syntax works, we start parsing the >line from left to right and find out that something like: > >| {foo | bar} > >probably means "either 'foo' or 'bar'", no big deal. Next comes 'table' in >bold font. What does

Re: RFC: Synopsis syntax change in nft.8

2017-08-10 Thread Florian Westphal
Phil Sutter wrote: > When looking at nft man page for the first time, I remember finding the > synopsis for individual commands (e.g. 'add table') rather misleading. I > am biased, but the (BNF style) syntax used in the various iproute2 man > pages is much more precise, so I would