trying to improve mandoc Solaris support

[Joerg Schilling via buildfarm]

Ingo Schwarze <schwarze at usta.de> wrote:

> According to Cynthia, three noteworthy versions existed:
>
>  * mdoc(7) version 1 was never checked into version control, never
>    published, and the source code is probably lost.  It was what
>    Cynthia used when starting the work.
>
>  * mdoc(7) version 2 is still available here:
>    http://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/share/tmac/tmac.doc.old
>    That version was short-lived:  It was only contained
>    in 4.3BSD-Reno and 4.3BSD-Net/2, but in Reno, only a small
>    number of manuals was converted to mdoc(7), most were still
>    shipped in the old man(7) format, and in Net/2, conversion
>    to version 3 had already started.
>    
>  * mdoc(7) version 3 is available here:
>    http://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/share/tmac/doc
>    (and the doc-* files in the same directory)
>    That's the version used in all variants of 4.4BSD,
>    and the only one people usually have in mind when talking
>    about "mdoc(7)" today.

I am trying to find out which version I used and reply later.

BTW: I am soon going to publish the CSRG source SCCS without a loss of meta 
data once I have SCCSv6 ready enough. I discussed this with Kirk McKusick a 
while ago and it seems that if I manually fix all the bugs from the disk crash
that happened to the BSD people and if I convert the format from SCCSv4 to 
SCCSv6, the license problems with the original CSRG CDs will go agay as they
did with the svn converted version.

> [...]
> > most of the man pages for my OSS packages use tbl features
> > that do not work with mandoc.
>
> Using unusual tbl(7) features in manuals doesn't look like a
> particularly good idea to me, in particular if you care about
> portability.

I am not using unusual features of tbl, but standard features. As people 
usually assume that a man page is processed by calling:

	soelim <files> | tbl | nroff -u1 -Tlp -man - | col -x'

all standard tbl features are OK. If mandoc does not support the features in 
use, then it seems to be a bad idea...

Jörg

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