Date:        Mon, 30 Sep 2002 13:08:07 -0400 (EDT)
    From:        woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods)
    Message-ID:  <20020930170807.7C34DA@proven.weird.com>

  | While such a style is in general good practice with troff, such
  | gratuitous changes to existing documentation is quite intrusive and will
  | make comparisons with original *BSD docs,

Essentially all the original *BSD docs were written in that style
already.   In those days, people knew how to write *roff...

Almost all the serious changes have been to docs (man pages) that have been
added since.  The more recent the man page, the more problems it has.

It also isn't just good practice, it is required for *roff to correctly
detect end of sentence.

  | They also really don't make sense for documents that may still be
  | "authoritatively" maintained by some third party!

For stuff that is simply imported from other places, that's certainly
true - you'll notice that none of the dist directories are being touched.

kre