Clarification needed in regards to "WARNING: blank line in fill mode, using .sp"

[Raf Czlonka <rczlonka@gmail.com>]

Hello,

While linting mdoc(7)-formatted manual pages, blank lines in them
generate the below warning message:

	mandoc: foo.1:20:1: WARNING: blank line in fill mode, using .sp

'.sp' is obviously a roff(7) request and the above, if not explicitly,
does seem to suggest using it is the "proper" way to fix the manual
page's formatting, at least implicitly.

This seem to be contrary to what the mdoc(7) manual page says:

	Many aspects of the basic syntax of the mdoc language are
	based on the roff(7) language; see the LANGUAGE SYNTAX and
	MACRO SYNTAX sections in the roff(7) manual for details,
	in particular regarding comments, escape sequences, whitespace,
	and quoting.  However, using roff(7) requests in mdoc
	documents is discouraged; mandoc(1) supports some of them
	merely for backward compatibility.

I'm obviously talking about the "discouraged" here as there's no
backward compatibility to speak of - as mentioned earlier, this is
an mdoc(7)-formatted manual page.

Given that '.sp' is nowhere to be found in mdoc(7) and is only
present in roff(7), perhaps the warning should mention '.Pp' macro
instead?

Without knowing any of the above, one might simply take the warning
at a face value and replace the blank line with roff(7)'s '.sp'.

What do others think? What should the linter say in order to aid
new authors in producing better-formatted mdoc(7) manual pages?

Regards,

Raf
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