[ On Tuesday, October 1, 2002 at 18:46:20 (+0700), Robert Elz wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: "New sentence, new line." 
>
> 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.

The question is will these "gratuitous" changes be pulled onto the
release branches?  I think it should happen immediately if possible so
that users of the release can submit useful patches to those documents.
If not then any attempt to patch those documents on the release branches
will require much greater effort (regardless of which direction the
patch is coming from).  The alternative is to back out these changes.

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

I'm not so sure that's true of groff.  A sentence end should also be
correctly detected if there are two space characters following a
punctuation mark which can be treated as a sentence end.

(Strictly speaking in AT&T troff sentences are effectively handled
"properly" in most respects if in the input their ending punctuation is
followed by two space characters, and that is of course because troff
preserves additional space characters found within an input line.  This
works because the only thing troff does special with sentence ends is to
ensure the space after the punctuation mark is wider than the space
which would normally appear between two words on that same line.)

>   | 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.

I've seen at least one or two of these changes made to third party
sources that are properly integrated into the main source tree too.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>