Re: [PATCH] Document GNU_ROFF in Makefile

From: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
Date: Oct 21, 2009, 22:51 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0910211824220.5105@dr-wily.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <7vk4yoz8sf.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> > +# Define GNU_ROFF if you have GNU roff and you don't want to have pretty
> > +# apostrophe so that cut&pasting examples to the shell will work.
> 
> This makes it sound as if groff is the only roff implementation that has 
> this problem---iow, if we use non-GNU roff then the documentation comes 
> out just fine.  Is that the case?

Yes:
                            built without GNU_ROFF   built with GNU_ROFF
 viewed with non-GNU roff   correct (')              wrong (no output!)
 viewed with GNU groff      wrong (´)                correct (')

In order to build a manpage that can be viewed correctly on both platforms, the conditional logic should live in the manpage itself (as per the bug comments I linked to and Thomas quoted from).

Anders