Hi Branden, Aleksa,

On Wed, Aug 06, 2025 at 04:11:57AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

quoted

Is there any way of knowing how long an identifier can be before it's
necessary to \%-ify it?

TL;DR: five letters.[1]

Good to know.

I use the following shell script to aid me while composing pages:

[...]

Example:

$ hyphen FSCONFIG_SET_PATH_EMPTY
FS‐CON‐FIG_SET_PATH_EMPTY

While I see the usefulness, I'd find it cumbersome having to ask it
about every identifier I'll be using.

quoted

I don't know if the man-pages folks will accept a man page that is
just full of \% for every identifier (and there doesn't appear to be
any rule when it comes to existing \% usage).

I haven't made my mind yet about it.  So far, I err on the side of too
few of these, but I don't reject patches which use it abundantly.

I personally never use it, unless I read the page and find some line
break ugly.  And *never* use it in manual page references (BR), with the
rationale being that we'll eventually replace them with MR, which does
that for us.

The Linux man-pages project now provides a few scripts under ./bin/src/
which distros might be installing (Arch maybe, since it's one of the few
that has packaged the latest releases already).  Among those, there's
diffman-git(1), which you can use to see the changes of your patches to
a manual page.  You can also run the script from the source repository,
of course.  For example:

	$ diffman-git HEAD
	grotty:<standard input>:(<standard input>):9: warning: unrecognized X command 'sgr 0' ignored
	grotty:<standard input>:(<standard input>):9: warning: unrecognized X command 'sgr 0' ignored
	--- HEAD^:man/man2const/PR_GET_TIMING.2const
	+++ HEAD:man/man2const/PR_GET_TIMING.2const
	@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
		#include <linux/prctl.h>  /* Definition of PR_* constants */
		#include <sys/prctl.h>
	 
	-       int prctl(PR_SET_TIMING);
	+       int prctl(PR_GET_TIMING);
	 
	 DESCRIPTION
		Return which process timing method is currently in use.

(BTW, Branden, why am I seeing those error messages recently?)


Have a lovely day!
Alex

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>