Up to [cvsweb.bsd.lv] / mandoc / regress / roff / nr
Request diff between arbitrary revisions
Default branch: MAIN
Current tag: HEAD
Revision 1.4 / (download) - annotate - [select for diffs], Fri Jan 3 16:34:13 2025 UTC (6 months, 1 week ago) by schwarze
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: HEAD
Changes since 1.3: +9 -7 lines
Diff to previous 1.3 (colored)
Rudimentatary implementation of the read-only number register \(.l, which is supposed to contain the line length in basic units, by setting it to a constant width of 78 characters, no matter what the output width (-O width) is actually set to. This occurs in man(7) code produced by DocBook XSL, for example in DocBook XSL version 1.79.2, and hence it shows up in real-world manual pages. For example, tb@ reported finding it in git-reset(1) last year. Of course, setting this register to a constant value defeats the very purpose the register is supposed to serve in the first place. However, the most fundamental design principle of mandoc(1) is that the parse tree is independent of the output mode. That's not merely a technical restriction but helps to make sure that the *content* of documentation shown to the user does not depend on the output mode. So allowing this register to depend on the "-O width" argument would result in a layering violation that might, in the worst case, cause a reliability issue.