Re: mandoc on macOS

[Mingye Wang <arthur200126@gmail.com>]

Jan:
> Apparently one needs to read up on "Using the Feedback Assistant app"
> https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/#feedback-assistant
> and I for one cannot drag myself to anything like that.

The thing about the Feedback Assistant is that you don't get to share
feedbacks using a link and have others comment on it like a Bugzilla
or even Microsoft's Feedback Hub. And usually you don't get any
feedback from Apple about what they are doing with it, so it's overall
designed to... make you not want to do it.

> Interestingly, mandoc is not among the repos at
> https://opensource.apple.com/releases/

Yep, GitHub search (see below) turns up nothing. This leads to a
tangential complaint with mandoc: there's no version output! The
people at GitHub was a little frustrated with that. (PR was stuck for
some unrelated reason.)[2]
  [2]: https://github.com/github/markup/pull/1196#issuecomment-716567772

Ingo:
>If something is broken in mandoc, that's more likely to generate
>wrong output than to issue an error or warning message.

Or it might just get stuck. The test really doesn't make sense: a
timeout would work better than a lint.

> Do they patch their manuals
> when they are broken, or do they merely (every few decades)
> pull in complete software packages from FreeBSD and other third
> parties, without any local modifications?  I have no idea.

The BSD manuals seem to match what they are pulling with some edits to
match what they do on their own end. And then there's their own
manuals for what they write. You can often tell which is which from
the quality of the HISTORY section :)

They have in at least one case modified a manual page to fix lint
errors: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/awk/blob/f51027cfca6efef532f95b0b5bcbee995c3e6498/awk.plist#L24.
There seems to be a couple more in
https://github.com/search?q=org%253Aapple-oss-distributions+mandoc&type=code.

Regards,
Mingye
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