Re: mandoc shortcomings

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 08:54:54AM +0000, David Brownlee wrote:
> There is at least one other option between 1 and 2 (which comes with
> two variants :)
> - Use mandoc for everything in base, and ensure everything in base is
> compatible with it. (I would agree that the latter should be a
> prerequisite for the former).
> - For pkgsrc either default to mdoc and have a per package option to
> indicate that package needs more than mandoc can provide (similar to
> the 'need bash as a shell' type options we already have), or just
> default to groff everywhere.

I don't see the point. Almost all cases of man pages failing to give a
decent output with mandoc fell into one of two categories:
(1) Stupid macro abuse that just accidentely worked with groff.
(2) Creating a feature test for groff use.

groff's own man pages often fall into category (2). They don't need to
use nearly as much low level features as they do, the equivalent mandoc
documentation clearly shows that. The first category is an example of
setting down and fixing them. Of course, fixing issues requires knowing
about them and that can't be done by unspecific, vague complains. The
amount of work for marking a package as not mandoc-supported is not much
smaller than just fixing issues in first place.

Joerg