Re: [PATCH 2/2] doc: remove GNU_ROFF option

On 2021-05-12 at 04:45:53, Felipe Contreras wrote:

brian m. carlson wrote:

quoted

By default, groff converts apostrophes in troff source to Unicode
apostrophes.  This is helpful and desirable when being used as a
typesetter, since it makes the output much cleaner and more readable,
but it is a problem in manual pages, since apostrophes are often used
around shell commands and these should remain in their ASCII form for
compatibility with the shell.

Fortunately, the DocBook stylesheets contain a workaround for this case:
they detect the special .g number register, which is set only when using
groff, and they define a special macro for apostrophes based on whether
or not it is set and use that macro to write out the proper character.
As a result, the DocBook stylesheets handle all cases correctly
automatically, whether the user is using groff or not, unlike our
GNU_ROFF code.

Additionally, this functionality was implemented in 2010.  Since nobody
is shipping security support for an operating system that old anymore,
we can just safely assume that the user has upgraded their system in the
past decade and remove the GNU_ROFF option and its corresponding
stylesheet altogether.

I'm not sure of all that, but my machine uses Arch Linux, it ships with
groff, I've never used GNU_ROFF=1, and I can copy text with apostrophes
from the genrated man pages just fine.

I'll rephrase to be clearer.  Solaris 10 is still security supported,
but no major Linux distro is, and I think we'll be both be fine dropping
support for OSes shipped in 2005.

I'm glad to hear confirmation that things work for you, though.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US