[bug #61605] [man pages] obfuscate source files to accommodate now-withdrawn stripper

[G. Branden Robinson]

Update of bug #61605 (project groff):

                 Summary: [man pages] Do not create trailing spaces => [man
pages] obfuscate source files to accommodate now-withdrawn stripper

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Follow-up Comment #2:

I comment to note that (1) groff no longer ships "strip.sed" as of 
1.23.0.rc2, and (2) a sed script should be able to successively modify the
pattern space to eliminate trailing spaces after having previously removed a
comment.

(2) might require the use of sed features one doesn't learn in the first ten
minutes of exposure to the language, like labels and the 't' command.  Such is
life.  The consensus of the groff community was that such stripping has not
yielded significant performance benefits for many years, and imposes other
complications.

See [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2018-03/msg00019.html one
mailing list discussion of the subject], and the
[https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/ChangeLog?id=ee41d36200ffc989eac09e65db7537bf59dd1c62
groff change history] for an example of the problems the assumption of
stripping can cause.


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