Hi Branden, Mike, On 7/24/20 2:15 PM, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > At 2020-07-24T12:13:33+0200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: >> On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 at 02:03, G. Branden Robinson >> <g.branden.robinson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> it is a hint to the man >>> program to preprocess the man page text through tbl. >> >> Yes, that's my understanding. But I believe that these days it's no >> longer needed(?). tbl(1) just gets used as needed, regardless of the >> presence of the 't' comment, right? > > [A few "strace -f -e execve"s later...] > > Hmm, for the man-db man(1) in Debian bullseye (testing), at least, this > is true! And checking its own man page, it looks like it was true as > far back as April 2001 (the horizon of its Git history). > > I guess there are so many man pages that embed tables without including > the hint that the man-db maintainers decided not to leave the comment to > chance. That would be my guess. > The only other man-like program I know if in anything like wide > use on Linux systems is mandoc, which does all its own parsing and > doesn't depend on a *roff at all. > > Retaining an accurate comment would be a kindness to other man > implementations I'm not aware of and to weirdos like me who run groff > directly because we develop it (though admittedly, even for us, there is > the crutch of grog(1)). But I'll grant--these populations may be small. Yes, and in any case, the man-pages pages are already widely omitting this comment. >> See my comments above. For 15 years or at least, I've not paid any >> attention to adding the 't' comments when I added tables to pages, and >> I do recall anyone reporting ill effects. So, I'm inclined to apply >> Mike's patch, but will hold off a moment, in case there's other >> feedback. > > Sounds fair. Branden, thanks for your detailed analysis. Mike, I've applied the patch, but completely rewrote the commit message, as below. Cheers, Michael == Various pages: Drop t comment header Historically, a comment of the following form at the top of a manual page was used to indicate too man(1) that the use of tbl(1) was required in order to process tables: '\" t However, at least as far back as 2001 (according to Branden), man-db's man(1) automatically uses tbl(1) as needed, rendering this comment unnecessary. And indeed many existing pages in man-pages that have tables don't have this comment at the top of the file. So, drop the comment from those files where it is present. -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/