Subject: bug#74808: date.1: Some remarks and and a patch for editorial changes for this man page

From: "Brendan O'Dea" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2024 07:32:53 +1100

There is a detailed message here:
https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/21239#issuecomment-1645998105 relating
to a similar issue with pod2man.

>From that it seems that CR is a replacement which should work for groff, if
I read that correctly, James Clarke used that from the start.

The story about supporting AT&T troff is less clear, but my reading is that
CR may not work there.

I'm currently on leave, away from my computer, but expect to address this
in help2man after I come back.

My planned fix was to just switch to CR, as that should resolve the issue
for pretty much everyone, given the prevalence of groff.

I could provide an option with CR as the default, but that wouldn't really
help anyone who received the pre-built date.1 .

On Thu, 12 Dec 2024, 15:07 Paul Eggert, <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On 2024-12-11 18:28, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote:
> > troff:<stdin>:236: warning: font name 'CW' is deprecated
>
> That "CW" was generated by help2man so I'll CC this message to
> <[email-masked]> as per
> <https://www.gnu.org/software/help2man/#Reports>.
>
> Can you suggest what help2man should use instead of \f(CW? Help2man
> needs be be portable to older groff and likely to traditional troff.
>
> To the help2man maintainers: apparently groff now complains about \f(CW;
> see <https://bugs.gnu.org/74808>.
>