Felipe Contreras ee6ad78260 doc: remove GNU troff workaround ...

In 2007 the docbook project made the mistake of converting ' to \' for
man pages [1]. It's a problem because groff interprets \' as acute
accent which is rendered as ' in ASCII, but as ´ in utf-8.

This started a cascade of bug reports in git [2], debian [3], Arch Linux
[4], docbook itself [5], and probably many others.

A solution was to use the correct groff character: \(aq, which is always
rendered as ', but the problem is that such character doesn't work in
other troff programs.

A portable solution required the use of a conditional character that is
\(aq in groff, but ' in all others:

  .ie \n(.g .ds Aq \(aq
  .el .ds Aq '

The proper solution took time to be implemented in docbook, but in 2010
they did it [6]. So the docbook man page stylesheets were broken from
1.73 to 1.76.

Unfortunately by that point many workarounds already existed. In the
case of git, GNU_ROFF was introduced, and in the case of Arch Linux
a mapping from \' to ' was added to groff's man.local. Other
distributions might have done the same, or similar workarounds.

Since 2010 there is no need for this workaround, which is fixed
elsewhere, not just in docbook, but other layers as well.

Let's remove it.

[1] ea2a0bac56
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20091012102926.GA3937@debian.b2j/
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=507673#65
[4] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9643
[5] https://sourceforge.net/p/docbook/bugs/1022/
[6] fb55343426

Inspired-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Signed-off-by: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

2023-03-21 13:16:46 -07:00

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