Re: man/man8/ldconfig.8: document system-wide tunables

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:56:37 -0500

Newsgroups	org.kernel.vger.linux-man
Message-ID	<20260714065637.gzccx2gluxfa2cen@illithid>

[self-follow-up]

At 2026-07-13T17:22:37-0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2026-07-13T17:33:05-0400, DJ Delorie wrote:
> > Alejandro Colomar <[email protected]> writes:
> > > You should indent this compared to the surrounding text:
> > >
> > > 	.IP
> > > 	.in +4n
> > 
> > Isn't that what the .IP does ?
> 
> There were difficulties, some imposed by the previous Linux man-pages
> maintainer, Michael Kerrisk.

I worded that sentence like crap, and threw shade on Michael when I
didn't mean to.  There was a very pretty _constraint problem_ that
Michael posed to me--one I was unable to solve.  Sorry, Michael!

I sympathize with the problem, and don't often endorse "punching through
the floor" to employ "raw" *roff requests in a man(7) document, but this
was an exception.  The Linux man-pages corpus is huge; Michael then and
Alex now have a large management challenge, so it's reasonable to
facilitate shuffling EX/EE examples from place to place in that corpus
with simple copy-and-paste operations.

> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/[email protected]/

That link remains a good précis of the problem.  One could show up my
man(7) composition abilities and earn my gratitude by solving that
constraint problem using only macros from the package.  :)

Alternatively, if I think of a backward-compatible extension I can add
to groff man(7) that would eliminate the need for these `in` requests,
I'd likely implement it.  I welcome design suggestions!

I should not send mails after a 12-hour session preparing a release
candidate...

Regards,
Branden

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