Justification regression with groff 1.23.0 (?)

[guillemj]

Hi!

I recently noticed that in Debian unstable, manual pages generated from pod, are no longer left aligned everywhere. They are at the beginning, but for example once there are options the justification gets set to both. I think this is a regression in combination with groff 1.23.0, but I've not tested the current stuff from Debian unstable with an older groff (only verifyied that bookworm behaves as expected), nor know whether this is a problem in groff (some kind of regression) or in podlators (some misuse or wrong assumption for some macro perhaps).

Just wanted to file this to not forget.

[rra]

Yeah, I noticed this too and it does seem to be related to .IP/.TP. I also suspect that this is a groff regression. I need to join the groff mailing list and inquire.

[rra]

This is because of the addition of:

.  ad \\*[AD]

to the an-write-paragraph-tag function in the an macro set, so far as I can tell. I have inquired on the groff mailing list if there's some way that I can support the intent of the AD register but still change the default under nroff to ragged right justification instead of full justification.

BTW, I believe the intent of this AD macro is that you can set MANROFFOPT to -dAD=l and get ragged right justification for every man page, not just the ones generated by pod2man.

[guillemj]

Ah, thanks for the investigation! I've now set MANROFFOPT in my environment to get a uniform style, although it would indeed be best if what pod2man generates could be formatted as before. :)

[rra]

Branden agreed that this is a regression and a fix has been committed to the groff repository for the next release. We're currently discussing what, if anything, Pod::Man should do in the meantime, which depends on release schedules, etc. I'd also kind of like to support the AD register properly if someone really wants full justification.

I'm trying to talk Branden into making the default ragged right under nroff for all man pages. That's a big change since groff has always defaulted to full justification, but older UNIX nroff did default to ragged right.

Discussion is in the thread starting at https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2024-03/msg00078.html

[g-branden-robinson]

That's a big change since groff has always defaulted to full justification, but older UNIX nroff did default to ragged right.

...in some places at some times.

Quoting myself in a groff mailing list post:

The history of this practice is inconsistent. Seventh Edition Unix
(1979) disabled adjustment of man pages when rendering in nroff mode,[3]
and BSD retained that disablement until death. SunOS commented it as
early as SunOS 2.0 (1985), thus restoring adjustment in nroff mode, and
retained that all the way through Solaris 10 (2005). When James Clark
wrote groff starting in about 1989, his man(7) implementation closely
emulated SunOS. With the Solaris 11 release in 2010, Oracle discarded
its AT&T-descended troff in favor of the then-current groff release.
They're still on groff 1.22.2 (2013) today, and so they've been
adjusting their man pages in nroff mode for at least 40 years, as has
groff for about 35. I don't know what other System V Unices did.

Some people have lobbied me to turn the default for adjustment off in
nroff mode for man pages, but I've resisted, in part for consistency
with groff's own entire history and the expectations of the once large
(but now aging) population of Sun Unix users, but also because I feel
that groff's defaults in nroff mode should be as similar to troff mode
as practical, to minimize surprises when switching among output devices.

As of groff 1.23.0 (2023) the default adjustment setting in groff man(7)
(and mdoc(7)) is completely under user control.

podlators takes that control away again, but I'm looking for a solution that will satisfy both Russ and me.

[g-branden-robinson]

As of groff 1.23.0 (2023) the default adjustment setting in groff man(7)
(and mdoc(7)) is completely under user control.

podlators takes that control away again, but I'm looking for a solution that will satisfy both Russ and me.

We may have found one.