Re: *roff `\~` support (was: [PATCH 4/6] xattr.7: wfix)

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Branden,

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Fri, Aug 12, 2022 at 11:23:11PM -0500:
> At 2022-08-12T16:30:01+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:

>> There are people using Plan 9 for practical work though, they have
>> even occasionally posted on the groff and mandoc lists, so that is a
>> bit more of a problem.

> plan9port's troff is no longer a problem, thanks to Dan Cross acting on
> my pull request at relativistic speed.
> https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/commit/93f814360076ccf28d33c9cb909fca7200ba4a7d

Nice.  :-)

> I also have a PR pending with Illumos.
> https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/pull/83

Illumos isn't doing development on GitHub.

Besides, Illumos is less of a problem because they have been using
mandoc as the default manual page formatter since July 2014.

All the same, getting \~ supported in their general-purpose
roff implementation is no doubt nice to have, too.

That reduces my converns mostly to commercial UNIXes and potentially
to a few ad-hoc conversion tools we are not even aware of.
Consequently, the converns aren't 100% resolved yet but getting
closer to becoming theoretical concerns.  If it's only commercial
UNIXes and unknown tools that may break, the improved typesetting
quality may be worth the risk.

Yours,
  Ingo