Re: [Groff] doclifter on groffer.man

[Eric S. Raymond]

Bernd Warken <address@hidden>:
> `doclifter' should be fixed to handle this correctly.  I cannot
> detect any necessity for a "safe" list.  I will not fall back to the
> old scheme of 2 letter variable names.

I opened this discussion because, for just eight pages out of over 13,000,
adding the additional complexity to handle these additional features
seems unwarranted.

Gunnar Ritter then pointed out that these features break other programs
besides doclifter.  XMan, Rosetta, TkMan -- all programs other than 
groff's own rendering engine blow higher than up on this hackery.  Even
troff classic breaks.

I alreadty support quite a few groff extensions in my code.  Improving
doclifter the rest of the way to handle your macros is something I
could be persuaded to do if that were sufficient to solve the problems
with the macros.  

Unfortunately, it is not.  What you are really doing with them is
making your man sources un-renderable by *anything* but groff.

That is the real bug here, and that's what needs to be fixed.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>