Re: removing the .IX macro from the ms package in 1.23 breaks old documents

[Dave Kemper]

On Sun, Oct 13, 2024 at 8:31 AM G. Branden Robinson
<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> It isn't, yet.  What you have seen is a Savannah bug report about it.[2]
> It was filed anonymously.  ("Who _was_ that masked man?"  Dave Kemper, I
> reckon.)

Guilty.  I (sometimes) anonymously file tickets in which I have no
personal interest, since I'm already the submitter of record on over
100 currently open tickets.  But if others find the anonymous filings
annoying, I can stop.


On Sun, Oct 13, 2024 at 10:49 AM joerg van den hoff
<veedeehjay@gmail.com> wrote:
> * the true motivation for removing .IX from groff-ms as I now understand from 
> your final remarks
> seems to just boil down to "it came in my way by using stderr and mixed with 
> the error messages I
> was interested in".

That wasn't my takeaway from Branden's lengthy email *at all*.  He
pointed out that there were differing historical implementations of
.IX that behaved differently.

Given the same set of facts, I probably wouldn't have made the same
choice: I'm all for code cleanup, but I favor giving things a longer
deprecation period.  However, when I brought up for discussion the
topic of when to deprecate things and when to remove them
(http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2024-10/msg00028.html), the only reply
was Branden's, which I took to mean no one else felt strongly about it
(other than perhaps Deri, whose comments earlier in the thread
prompted mine).