On 1/8/21 1:44 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: > On 1/8/21 12:49 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote: >> >> >> On 1/8/21 12:29 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: >>> Hi Alex, >>> >>> On Thu, 7 Jan 2021 at 18:11, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) >>> <alx.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi Michael, >>>> >>>> On 1/6/21 1:51 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: >>>>> Hi Alex, >>>>> >>>>> On 1/5/21 10:56 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote: >>>>>> Hi Michael, >>>>>> >>>>>> While having a look at your latest commits, >>>>>> I saw that there's a bit of inconsistency in escaping whitespace >>>>>> (existing previous to the commit): >>>>>> >>>>>> Sometimes it's [!\ (], and sometimes it's [! (]. >>>>> >>>>> Thanks for prodding me about this. >>>>> >>>>> Yes, it's inconsistent. And given the use of .nf/.fi >>>>> around the text blocks, escaping the spaces serves no >>>>> purpose. So I made a more radical fix; see commit >>>>> 5c10d2c5e299011e34adb568737acfc8920fc27c >>>> >>>> Nice! >>>> >>>> After your following commit (422d5327a88fa89394100bafad69b21e50b26399), >>>> I found that there are many such cases. Just [[grep -rnI '\\ ' man?]] >>>> and you'll see. Some of them are valid, but a lot of them aren't. >>> >>> Can you point me at some examples? >> >> A sample: >> >> man3/envz_add.3:61:.RI ( *envz ,\ *envz_len ) >> << this should be two lines >> man3/xdr.3:184:.IR "long\ *" . >> << unnecessary >> man3/scandir.3:277:.IR "const void\ *" . >> << unnecessary and self-inconsistent >> man5/proc.5:1350:.RI ( "readelf\ \-l" ). >> << unnecessary >> man7/symlink.7:424:.I "rm\ \-r slink directory" >> << unnecessary and self-inconsistent >> man7/feature_test_macros.7:492:.IR "cc\ \-std=c99" ). >> << unnecessary >> man8/ld.so.8:313:.IR "readelf\ \-n" >> << unnecessary >> >> Maybe I'm missing something? > > So, the point here is that suppose a line break falls badly and we end up with > > ...................... const void > * ............................... > > or > > ......................... readelf > -n .............................. > > or > .............................. cc > -std=c99 ........................ > > or > > .............................. 16 > MB .............................. > > The general problem here is that a small piece of a unit (usually at > the end) is broken onto a new line, making things a bit more > difficult to read. That sort of thing is ugly, I think. That's > why there is the "\\ ". > Ahhh, true. Thanks! > Maybe there are a few redundant cases. And maybe there are a few > borderline cases. For example, maybe in envz_add.3, "\\ " is > not strictly necessary (though I'm inclined to keep it). > > There may still be a few misplaced "\\ " escapes (I just fixed a few), > but many of these really are needed, I think. > > Cheers, > > Michael > -- Alejandro Colomar Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/
