Re: Parsing of .Ex with -std argument

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Abhinav,

sorry for not answering this one in a timely fashion.
I was occupied with other matters back then and forgot
to send a preliminary answer.

Abhinav Upadhyay wrote on Sun, Oct 02, 2016 at 11:13:00PM +0530:

> I'm having issues parsing man pages which use the .Ex macro in the
> EXIT STATUS section. For example mandoc -Ttree shows following output
> for a man page using it:
> 
> Sh (block) *138:2
>   Sh (head) 138:2
>       EXIT STATUS (text) 138:5
>   Sh (body) 138:2
>       Ex (elem) -std *139:2
>           nbperf (text) 139:2
> 
> This is causing makemandb(8) (NetBSD's indexing tool) parse the EXIT
> STATUS section just as "nbperf" instead of the complete expanded text.

This was a symptom of a more general problem.  The text production
macros - .At, .Bsx, .Bx, .Ex, .Fx, .Lb, .Nx, .Ox, .Rv, .St, .Ux
and the obsolete .Bt and .Ud - handled their task inconsistently.
Some produced text at the validation stage and added it to the
syntax tree, notably .Lb and .St.  Others did little at the
validation stage and left text production to the formatters,
notably .Ex and .Rv.  Both approaches had downsides.  Text
production at the validation stage obscured the content of the
original source document, making it impossible to recover the source
from the finalized syntax tree.  Text production in the formatters
implied code duplication and the problem you describe for tools
using the library.

I now committed substantial changes cleaning this up, introducing
a flag NODE_NOPRT such that content that is required in the source
code but not intended to be printed can remain in the tree, for
example the argument of .St, solving the first problem, and introducing
a flag NODE_NOSRC such that generated content not contained in the
source document can be marked, allowing to solve the second problem
and do text generation at the validation stage for all macros, even
for .Ex and .Rv.  This work required a number of commits; i'm
appending the commit message of the final one at the end.

The resulting changes will be in mandoc-1.13.5 and in mandoc-1.14.x
when released.

> I compared this with the previous version of mandoc. The -Ttree output
> then didn't use to show the Ex macro in the output and makemandb(8)
> also indexed the EXIT STATUS section as blank strings (I am noticing
> it just now).

Yes, i think this was always inconsistent in the way described above.

> I guess, I could fix this in makemandb(8) by adding a handler for .Ex
> macro but it would probably be better if mandoc(3) provided some way
> to handle it?

I agree with that suggestion, hence this series of commits.

Here is the result:

  schwarze@isnote $ echo .Ex nbperf | mandoc -mdoc -Ttree
  Ex (elem) *1:2
      The (text) 1:2 NOSRC
      Nm (elem) 1:5 NOSRC
          nbperf (text) 1:5
      utility exits\~0 (text) 1:2 NOSRC
      on success, and\~>0 if an error occurs. (text) 1:2. NOSRC

  schwarze@isnote $ echo .Lb libc | ./mandoc -mdoc -Ttree
  Lb (elem) *1:2
      Standard C Library (libc, \-lc) (text) 1:2 NOSRC
      libc (text) 1:5 NOPRT

  schwarze@isnote $ echo .Nx 7.0.2 | mandoc -mdoc -Ttree  
  Nx (elem) *1:2
      NetBSD (text) 1:2 NOSRC
      7.0.2 (text) 1:5

  schwarze@isnote $ echo .St -p1003.1-2008 | mandoc -mdoc -Ttree
  St (elem) *1:2
      IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (\(LqPOSIX.1\(Rq) (text) 1:5 NOSRC
      -p1003.1-2008 (text) 1:5 NOPRT

  schwarze@isnote $ echo .Ar | mandoc -mdoc -Ttree               
  Ar (elem) *1:2
      file (text) 1:2 NOSRC
      ... (text) 1:2 NOSRC

Thanks for making me aware of the issue,
  Ingo


CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	schwarze@cvs.openbsd.org	2017/01/11 10:39:45

Modified files:
	usr.bin/mandoc : mandocdb.c mdoc_html.c mdoc_man.c mdoc_term.c 
	                 mdoc_validate.c 
	regress/usr.bin/mandoc/mdoc: Makefile 
Added files:
	regress/usr.bin/mandoc/mdoc/Ud: Makefile arg.in arg.out_ascii 
	                                arg.out_lint 

Log message:
Do text production for .Bt, .Ex, .Rv, .Ud at the validation stage
rather than in the formatters.  Use NODE_NOSRC flag for .Lb and
NODE_NOSRC and NODE_NOPRT for .St.  Results in a more rigorous
syntax tree and in 135 lines less code.

This work was triggered by a question from Abhinav Upadhyay <er dot
abhinav dot upadhyay at gmail dot com> (NetBSD) on discuss@.
--
 To unsubscribe send an email to discuss+unsubscribe@mdocml.bsd.lv