Re: [PATCH] doc: remove GNU troff workaround

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 21, 2023, 18:17 UTC
Message-ID: <20230321181702.GI3119834@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqcz52hu7n.fsf@gitster.g>

On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 10:47:56AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > I'd think 13 years is probably long enough, but I was curious about the
> > versions. You referenced the fix here:
> >
> >> [6] https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/commit/fb553434265906ed81edc6d5f533d0b08d200046
> >
> > but the earliest tag in that repository that contains that commit is
> > 1.79.1 from 2016. However, it seems like that repo is oddly missing
> > older tags. You mentioned 1.76 earlier, and the changelog for the Debian
> > package of docbook-xsl mentions the 1.76 release fixing it in 2010.
> 
> I wondered about the same thing, and did some digging myself
> yesterday.  The commit seems to have been merged to their 'master'
> branch with the commit 0418c172 (Merge branch 'master' of
> ../docbook-fixed, 2015-09-20), which is after a curious 5 year gap.

I suspect they were not using Git back then, and these commits were later imported, which may have caused some of our confusion (searching for docbook 1.76 shows releases on SourceForge, which implies a non-Git VCS).

The announcement of 1.76.0 in 2010 mentions a fix for the apostrophe issue:

  https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/201009/msg00023.html

Show 8 quoted lines

> > So assuming the fix really was released in 2010, even long-running
> > distros like CentOS probably would have picked it up within a few years,
> > and our workaround should definitely be obsolete by now.
> 
> ... even if the fixed release was done in 2016, I would say that it
> shouldn't be too recent, especially for documentation where we still
> give preformatted ones (which I think about dropping once every few
> years).

I could believe that some people are still stuck on 2016-era versions of dependencies, but yeah, I agree we can be a little more cavalier with documentation. Anyway, I think the right date really is 2010, as above.

-Peff