groff 1.25 status (was: [PATCH v2] [eqn]: Use XML character references in MathML output.)

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:54:29 -0500
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20260626195429.ld3gppt4whjo6wxn@illithid>
Hi Phong,

At 2026-06-08T10:20:46+0900, Nguyễn Gia Phong wrote:
> Gentle ping, I'm very much anticipating this patch to be applied
> in the upcoming 1.25 release!

I haven't forgotten!  As I'm travelling for a few days, I'll likely miss
my "tentative" "early July" target[1] for the 1.25 release, but I don't
think there are even 2 full weeks' worth of items I want to get done,
and my earlier, less precise calendar objective of simply "July"[2] is
not yet threatened.

When I adopted (with much encouragement from this list) the new cadence
and "calendar-based" strategy,[3] I implied, and later said,[4] that a
trait of this approach was to eschew release goals.

Goals have proven a difficult habit to break.  Ones I find difficult to
set aside are ones like the subject, where I've expressed an interest or
commitment to incorporating a fix or improvement for the next release.

Another example includes items I solicit from contributors, like Stefan
Möding's pic(1)-drawn diagram of *roff line layout parameters for our
Texinfo manual.  Tackling that has revealed that I need to tighten up
our "doc/doc.am" file with respect to maintainer-mode target rules and
to develop a better command of Texinfo's image inlining facilities.

Here's a list of things I'd like to get done for 1.25.

* Finish refactoring libgroff's `string` class for "fastidiousness" and
  to seize some performance improvements.  (My working copy has a
  revision of `string::move()` that appears to buy about a 5%
  improvement in total groff build time, which if my arithmetic is
  correct, must be an underestimate, since most of the groff build time
  is spent running the C++ compiler and linker, not running groff's own
  programs.  A better measurement would involve scrubbing from the tree
  the documents groff generates, then rebuilding them.  I have a script
  to do this many times to get a "good statistical sample", but haven't
  run it on this change yet.)

* Fix Savannah #68345: [troff] stop throwing font deprecation warnings
  on font names the user remaps to valid names.

* Fix Savannah #68309: [grohtml] want monospaced fonts back in man
  pages, gone in 1.22.4.

  I'm not _positive_ I can fix that one cleanly and correctly, but I
  want to try.

* Fix Savannah #68216: [PATCH] tmac/es.tmac: update/correct Spanish
  string translations.

* Fix Savannah #66987: [PATCH] [troff] refactor to kill off
  `ESCAPE_NEWLINE`.

* Sort out the eqn(1) MathML generation problem you reported.

* Incorporate Stefan Möding's pic(1)ture, as noted above.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2026-04/msg00037.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2026-01/msg00000.html
[3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2024-07/msg00068.html
[4] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2026-03/msg00046.html
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 833 B)