Re: [bug #57485] [PATCH] accept any number of arguments for .Dd in the groff_mdoc(7) macros

[Ingo Schwarze]

I'm not posting these answers into the bugtracker because these
points are not relevant for evaluating the patch; i'm merely sending
this mail to avoid that people get confused by the misleading
statements.

Steffen Nurpmeso wrote on Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 09:06:00PM +0100:

> And i have to go back to
>   .\"     @(#)tmac.doc.old        5.2 (Berkeley) 3/13/91

That is totally irrelevant.  That file doesn't even implement the
same language we are talking about (mdoc v3).  It implements the
substantially different mdoc v2 language.  Manual pages written in
one cannot be formatted with a formatter for the other at all, nor
vice versa.

> I mean, FreeBSD imported groff very early

FreeBSD was forked off 386BSD 0.1 which in turn was forked off
4.3BSD-Net/2, which already contained groff several years before
FreeBSD even existed, so the statement that FreeBSD imported groff
is quite misleading.

> Names like dbus-update-activation-environment could
> become a problem in conjunction with a date and something else
> a little longer.

No, *names* cannot cause line breaks.  The footer line only contains
the .Os identifier and the date, no name whatsoever.

> Well, i personally would rather do something like

[... ineffective patches snipped ...]

Your patches fail to fix the bug.
The original 4.4BSD manuals i listed are still misformatted with
your patches, and so are modern FreeBSD xo_attr(3) and ld(7)
and modern NetBSD dns-sd(1).