Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 07:40:05 +1100 From: Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy@ALCATEL.COM.AU> To: "Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@CA.Sandia.GOV> Cc: cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/bin/dd dd.1 Message-ID: <00Mar2.074008est.115221@border.alcanet.com.au> In-Reply-To: <200003011603.e21G3hJ84176@nimitz.ca.sandia.gov>; from bmah@CA.Sandia.GOV on Thu, Mar 02, 2000 at 03:06:21AM %2B1100 References: <73922.951896978@axl.ops.uunet.co.za> <200003011603.e21G3hJ84176@nimitz.ca.sandia.gov>
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On 2000-Mar-02 03:06:21 +1100, "Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@CA.Sandia.GOV> wrote:
>If memory serves me right, Sheldon Hearn wrote:
>> We should put something about this in the committers guide.
...
>Ummm, and for us lowly non-committers, who can only file PRs? :-)
The `committers guide' is part of the doc subtree (look in
.../doc/en_US.ISO_8859-1/articles/committers-guide/ - it doesn't
appear to have been translated anywhere else). There's nothing to
stop anyone reading it. (Which makes sense - aspiring committers can
learn what they're in for :-).
>From your subsequent commits, it seems to me that we want newlines in
>the groff source at the ends of sentences, and that having a sentence
>break in the middle of a line of groff source is bad. Is that right?
That's the general idea. Traditionally, troff sees various
punctuation ('.', '?' and '!') as sentence terminators when they occur
at the end of the line. This causes it to insert (I think) 1em
instead of 1en whitespace. I presume groff works the same way (though
I can't see where the ENDS_SENTENCE flag, with or without a following
newline, changes the spacing). Since '.' means end-of-sentence only
when it occurs at the end of the line, this prevents it incorrectly
adding an inter-sentence gap following a contraction (eg Mr.).
The other guideline I've seen (back when I first started using troff),
was to insert linebreaks at the end of clauses, and keep lines fairly
short. This tends to minimise the number of lines affected by a
change.
This writing style is significantly different to that used in (eg)
the GNU texinfo documentation.
Peter
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