[PATCH v2 01/12] doc: remove GNU troff workaround

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: May 21, 2021, 22:36 UTC
Message-ID: <20210521223701.526547-2-felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20210521223701.526547-1-felipe.contreras@gmail.com>

In 2007 the docbook project made the mistake of converting ' to \' for man pages [1]. It's a problem because groff interprets \' as acute accent which is rendered as ' in ASCII, but as ´ in utf-8.

This started a cascade of bug reports in git [2], debian [3], Arch Linux [4], docbook itself [5], and probably many others.

A solution was to use the correct groff character: \(aq, which is always rendered as ', but the problem is that such character doesn't work in other troff programs.

A portable solution required the use of a conditional character that is \(aq in groff, but ' in all others:

  .ie \n(.g .ds Aq \(aq
  .el .ds Aq '

The proper solution took time to be implemented in docbook, but in 2010 they did it [6]. So the docbook man page stylesheets were broken from 1.73 to 1.76.

Unfortunately by that point many workarounds already existed. In the case of git GNU_ROFF was introduced, and in the case of Arch Linux a mappig from \' to ' was added to groff's man.local. Other distributions might have done the same, or similar workarounds.

Since 2010 there is not need for this workaround, which is fixed elsewhere not just in docbook, but other layers as well.

Let's remove it.

Also, it's GNU troff, not GNU roff.

[1] https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/commit/ea2a0bac56c56eec1892ac3d9254dca89f7c5746 [2] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20091012102926.GA3937@debian.b2j/ [3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=507673#65 [4] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9643 [5] https://sourceforge.net/p/docbook/bugs/1022/ [6] https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/commit/fb553434265906ed81edc6d5f533d0b08d200046

Inspired-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Signed-off-by: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
---
 Documentation/Makefile               |  8 --------
 Documentation/manpage-quote-apos.xsl | 16 ----------------
 Makefile                             |  4 ----
 3 files changed, 28 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 Documentation/manpage-quote-apos.xsl

diff --git a/Documentation/Makefile b/Documentation/Makefile
index f5605b7767..bf1f66b3eb 100644
--- a/Documentation/Makefile
+++ b/Documentation/Makefile
@@ -178,14 +178,6 @@ MAN_BASE_URL = file://$(htmldir)/
 endif
 XMLTO_EXTRA += -m manpage-base-url.xsl
 
-# If your target system uses GNU groff, it may try to render
-# apostrophes as a "pretty" apostrophe using unicode.  This breaks
-# cut&paste, so you should set GNU_ROFF to force them to be ASCII
-# apostrophes.  Unfortunately does not work with non-GNU roff.
-ifdef GNU_ROFF
-XMLTO_EXTRA += -m manpage-quote-apos.xsl
-endif
-
 ifdef USE_ASCIIDOCTOR
 ASCIIDOC = asciidoctor
 ASCIIDOC_CONF =
diff --git a/Documentation/manpage-quote-apos.xsl b/Documentation/manpage-quote-apos.xsl
deleted file mode 100644
index aeb8839f33..0000000000
diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index 3a2d3c80a8..55dbdee98e 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -278,10 +278,6 @@ all::
 # Define NO_ST_BLOCKS_IN_STRUCT_STAT if your platform does not have st_blocks
 # field that counts the on-disk footprint in 512-byte blocks.
 #
-# Define GNU_ROFF if your target system uses GNU groff.  This forces
-# apostrophes to be ASCII so that cut&pasting examples to the shell
-# will work.
-#
 # Define USE_ASCIIDOCTOR to use Asciidoctor instead of AsciiDoc to build the
 # documentation.
 #

-- 
2.32.0.rc0