Subject: Re: bug#59631: 29.0.50; [PATCH] New check-man target to check man pages for errors

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2022 09:06:35 +0200

> From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2022 17:50:05 -0500
> 
> A feature limited to GNU-Like systems is not a horrible thing.  Our
> policy is that support for non-GNU-like systems is at best a secondary
> goal -- something users can implement if they wish, but we don't
> consider the lack of that support as a problem.
> 
> It's fine to make this call Groff directly, if it has no major
> drawbacks.  But please don't imply that the absence of that support
> would be horrible.

This is not a user-level feature.  This is a feature for Emacs developers,
and only for those of them who routinely work on producing the release
tarballs.  From my POV, it is important to make this kind of features to
work on as many systems as possible, if only to allow me to do these jobs
from my local system.

The feature is implemented in Groff, btw, the man page of 'man' says that
explicitly.

And I didn't say the inability to use Groff directly would be "horrible",
quite the contrary.  Quote:

> Can this be done by running Groff directly instead of via 'man'?  If it's
> possible, it's IMO better, since Groff installations are more widespread
> than the particular variant of 'man' you used in the script.  E.g., I think
> the requirement for C.UTF-8 locale being available can be dropped in that
> case.
> 
> But if doing so requires too much effort or research, feel free to install
> what you have.

Note the last paragraph.

So I consider your reprimand gratuitous and even mildly insulting.  It
sounds like you reacted to a single sentence, taken out of context, and
either didn't read or forgot the other messages I wrote in this thread.