Re: latest groff documentation is incompatible with latest GNU texinfo

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > Had I known the release date of 4.7 in advance,
>
> If you don't want to subscribe to texinfo-pretest (there were a
> bunch of pretests, as usual) for whatever reason, I can try to
> include you individually in at least some of my pretest
> announcements for 4.8.

Hmm, I'm already subscribed to more than 50 lists...

What about mentioning the `hot phase' of pretesting in other mailing
lists, say, emacs-devel?

> In the interest of simplifying your life and reducing the number of
> bugs you find, you might also try to simplify groff.texinfo.

Well, I have certain ideas how the groff manual shall look like, and
making those ideas work I have to work around some, hmm, features of
texinfo.

> The heavy use of @macro (as I recall) is a particular problem, as
> you know.

Not really.  The most significant problem is to rely on undocumented
behaviour of texinfo (or how to avoid it), for example the special
handling of data in @deffn or some obscure tricks to get HTML output
right.

> It doesn't matter to me, just a suggestion that might let you spend
> more time developing groff and less time fighting with Texinfo :).

An unfortunate fact is that the @deffn stuff is tightly bound to a
certain type of programming languages which must look similar to C or
Lisp -- as you know, the troff language differs completely (most
notably is the significance of whitespace at some places).


    Werner