Hi Branden,

On Wed, Nov 06, 2024 at 11:45:31AM GMT, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

You're not bringing any new information to the table, and you don't
appear to understand why the two-space rule is in place for _typesetting
software_.  I don't just mean *roff, but TeX as well.

Neither of these is a WYSIWYG system.  Neither of them is Markdown.

The rule is not there so that people can argue over how many space
widths should separate sentences.  The rule is there so that the
formatter knows where the boundaries between sentences _are_.

Actually, in this case it was about the use of intersentence space in a
commit message.  It was not about the contents of a manual page itself.

However, I think that loss of information is equally bad for a human
than for a type-setting system such as roff(1) or TeX.

If you despise the use of two spaces between sentences in a *roff source
document, there's an easy solution: use what Alex calls "semantic
newlines".

https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html.node/Sentences.html#Sentences

[...]

Arguing about the number of spaces between sentences in a discussion of
"semantic newlines" (or whatever you want to call them) is
counterproductive and wasteful of time.

Hmmm, you're right.  Using semantic newlines completely removes
intersentence spaces in manual pages; we shouldn't document that in
man-pages(7).  However, for commit messages I still want to enforce
two spaces, so we should probably document it in CONTRIBUTING.d/patches.

Have a lovely night!
Alex

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