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Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes
From: |
Eric S. Raymond |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes |
Date: |
Fri, 2 Feb 2007 05:40:55 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.4.2.2i |
Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>:
> > The previous stuff on my agenda is done, [...]
>
> Please add a ChangeLog entry! I insist on having entries for
> everything which isn't trivial (e.g., fixing typos in comments or
> documentation).
A catchup entry is done, and will be in my next commit. I'll follow this
practice in future.
> > When I go back to trying to make the man pages portable, I'm
> > wondering what the appropriate test protocol is. Is an eyeball
> > check that it looks right under both man in a terminal window and
> > Postscript sufficient?
>
> Yes. Please use groff's `-ww' option to catch potential problems.
> Ideally, there shouldn't be any warnings.
>
> BTW, according to my experience, a great deal of errors can be caught
> if you use
>
> (a) the colorized man output of the Midnight Commander (this is,
> pressing the F3 key on a man page)
> (b) different terminal line lengths, say, 80 and 100 characters.
The above sounds like it should be added to a README or TESTING file
in the tmac directory, if for no other reason than that the usefulness
of -ww is not elsewhere documented that I have seen. I think I'll
make that happen.
I have been applying the eyeball test to .SY/.OP/.YS conversions of
chem.man, grog.man, and the roff2.man pages, and it looks like I have
managed not to screw the pooch this time. Possibly this is because I
have not yet tried re-converting anything with .eo or truly hairy
macros in it. I'll torture these pages with groff -ww and mc, and
commit the new versions if that does not reveal breakage.
The truly horrible pages like groff_out.5 and groffer.1 are...still
truly horrible. But progress is being made. At this point I think
you can stop trying to rescue my old patches -- instead, I'll do a
second pass at the hard cases using what I learned the first time
around, changing them in small steps and testing each step.
(It's much, *much* easier to do things in small, manageable steps now
that I have CVS privs, so thanks for that.)
As for the -TMathML code, it has been stable through several runs on
the complete corpus of 13,000+ pages I use for doclifter testing,
producing results that look right and pass xmllint in all cases. I'm
feeling pretty confident about it. Until I decide to add mark/lineup
support, or coalesce numeric character boxes, or we decide to address
the font-escape problem in some other way than ignoring them, that
code is *done*.
It is rather remarkable how easy the -TMathmL implementation was --
less than three days from a gleam in my eye to production-quality
code. While I will cheerfully admit to being pretty good at things
that resemble compiler-writing, in this case no exceptional skill was
required. eqn and Presentation MathML have very different syntaxes,
but their object-and-box models are as near identical as makes no
difference.
This isn't a trivial observation, because other models are possible.
The rather more elaborate box-and-glue one TeX uses, for example, or
CSS's. I think one of the principals behind MathML must have studied
eqn very, very carefully. Which I guess is not surprising.
Makes me wonder why nobody wrote a translator before. And I did look.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
- [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes, Eric S. Raymond, 2007/02/01
- Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes, Werner LEMBERG, 2007/02/02
- Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes,
Eric S. Raymond <=
- Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes, Eric S. Raymond, 2007/02/02
- Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes, Werner LEMBERG, 2007/02/02
- Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes, Eric S. Raymond, 2007/02/02
- Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes, Werner LEMBERG, 2007/02/03
- Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes, Eric S. Raymond, 2007/02/03
- Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes, Werner LEMBERG, 2007/02/03
- Re: [Groff] Correct protocol for making changes, Gunnar Ritter, 2007/02/02