Lots of up-coming mandoc attention...

Lots of up-coming mandoc attention...

[Kristaps Dzonsons]

Hi, these last few months have been filled to saturation in terms of my 
research, but I've now a bit of time to spend on mandoc and intend to 
use every last moment of it.  You can see the beginning of the deluge in 
the source changes list.

To wit, I'll bring down the following major elements:

  (1) Move mdoc_action.c into mdoc_validate.c.

This has long been on my list, but remains unfinished.  I'm mostly done 
with it now.  It's fairly important because it also will let me unwind 
the notion of "failure" happening within the system, which is somewhat 
schizophrenic right now.

  (2) Same with man_action.c.

Similar reasons.  This will be much easier than for mdoc.

At this point I'll tag a mini-release, i.e., one that's not pushed to 
the site (having few outward-facing differences), but serves as a 
logical separation for...

  (3) Merging tbl.

Ingo's code will be the basis of full integration---i.e., tbl will be 
supported within the mandoc binary.  I really, really wish there were a 
way around this, but tbl needs contextual cues that just don't exist 
elsewhere (e.g., output mode, page width, symbols, etc.).  This will 
consist of changes in many areas of the code, but in short, parsing will 
occur in libroff and presentation will hook out of the appropriate 
frontends.  The node structures will include support for tbl trees. 
I'll keep the code separated out to allow for a standalone tbl(1) 
implementation.  tbl WILL bloat the codebase.  A lot.  But there's just 
no way to grab contextual clues as a preprocessor.

I strongly suggest re-considering, before I jump into all this, whether 
we want this much bloat.  If we can cull some aspects of the tbl 
language, and fix things like mode (pure text) and widths, then we can 
get away with a preprocessor.

I'll raise this again after the first release.

Following tbl, I'll move on to `de'.

Meanwhile, these mdoc.7 and roff.7 changes look quite nice, and I'd like 
to see them pushed into up-stream!

Thanks,

Kristaps
--
 To unsubscribe send an email to tech+unsubscribe@mdocml.bsd.lv