Re: ioperm(2): confusing terminology

On 17 Sep 2026 13:00 +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
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Which bring up the question, why not moving to a less hairy source
format?

This question comes up every now and then.  TL;DR: other formats are
worse.

man(7) is pretty simple, and easy to learn exactly by editing words
blindly.  There are very few macros, and their behavior is trivial once
you use them a few times.

One thing that is very important is that we use semantic newlines.
That discards .md and .rst, since they are meant to be written with
paragraphs as they'd be read by humans.

Sorry, I didn't read groff_man fully, but I'm curious: what is the
meaning of newlines in man that gets lost in those other formats?

They have no meaning.

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Looking at some source pages now and it seems most newlines are about as
(non) meaningful as in those formats (i.e., the paragraph is reflowed
during rendering).

I don't know how you read .md or .rst, but I read them in the terminal,
usually with less(1), which doesn't reflow them.

But you read the rendered manpage, the output of running groff (and co.)
on the manpage source, right?  If you were to read manpage sources with
less in the terminal there wouldn't be reflowing either, naturally.

The point I was making is that newlines in groff_man pages did not seem
to be more semantic than those in adoc/md/rst/whatever.  Upon rendering,
paragraph lines are reflowed.  After Robinson's explanation I can see 1
bit of meaning to them (sentence delimiters).

Is there any program for reading these in the terminal reflowed?

I guess there are although I don't personally use one (of course, that's
the point of these "light markup" formats: they mostly look like plain
text so you don't much need a renderer).  For example, there are plenty
of tools to convert these formats to HTML which can then be viewed in a
terminal browser.  Or one could use pandoc to convert them to *roff
and... haha ;).