Re: [PATCH] drop spurious t comment header

["Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>]

Hi Branden, Mike,

On 7/24/20 2:15 PM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2020-07-24T12:13:33+0200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
>> On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 at 02:03, G. Branden Robinson
>> <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> it is a hint to the man
>>> program to preprocess the man page text through tbl.
>>
>> Yes, that's my understanding. But I believe that these days it's no
>> longer needed(?). tbl(1) just gets used as needed, regardless of the
>> presence of the 't' comment, right?
> 
> [A few "strace -f -e execve"s later...]
> 
> Hmm, for the man-db man(1) in Debian bullseye (testing), at least, this
> is true!  And checking its own man page, it looks like it was true as
> far back as April 2001 (the horizon of its Git history).
> 
> I guess there are so many man pages that embed tables without including
> the hint that the man-db maintainers decided not to leave the comment to
> chance.  

That would be my guess.

> The only other man-like program I know if in anything like wide
> use on Linux systems is mandoc, which does all its own parsing and
> doesn't depend on a *roff at all.
> 
> Retaining an accurate comment would be a kindness to other man
> implementations I'm not aware of and to weirdos like me who run groff
> directly because we develop it (though admittedly, even for us, there is
> the crutch of grog(1)).  But I'll grant--these populations may be small.

Yes, and in any case, the man-pages pages are already widely omitting
this comment.

>> See my comments above. For 15 years or at least, I've not paid any
>> attention to adding the 't' comments when I added tables to pages, and
>> I do recall anyone reporting ill effects. So, I'm inclined to apply
>> Mike's patch, but will hold off a moment, in case there's other
>> feedback.
> 
> Sounds fair.

Branden, thanks for your detailed analysis.

Mike, I've applied the patch, but completely rewrote the commit
message, as below.

Cheers,

Michael

==

Various pages: Drop t comment header
  
Historically, a comment of the following form at the top of a
manual page was used to indicate too man(1) that the use of tbl(1)
was required in order to process tables:

    '\" t

However, at least as far back as 2001 (according to Branden),
man-db's man(1) automatically uses tbl(1) as needed, rendering
this comment unnecessary. And indeed many existing pages in
man-pages that have tables don't have this comment at the top of
the file.  So, drop the comment from those files where it is
present.


-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/