Bug#847972: man: Eliminate warnings from '*roff' about the undefined register 'F'

[Russ Allbery]

Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig at rhi.hi.is> writes:

>   1) The comment is wrong, because the code was changed from what it
> originally was (in my patch in the original bug report; see the last
> line of my input in the first e-mail of this thread).

Well, the comment is correct in that this is what is being attempted.  :)
Apparently it isn't working again.

Your original patch caused problems on HP-UX, which is why it was changed
upstream.  See:

https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=92979

However, I think all those changes may have not been necessary and only
the missing backslashes were necessary and your original patch was
otherwise fine once those backslashes are added (and possibly more correct
in avoiding warnings).  I'll give that a try.

Apologies for the regression; this is the confluence of two things that
basically no one ever does (enable nroff warnings, and use this obscure
indexing code), so it's essentially never tested.

>   1) 'F' is not a random register in manual pages.

It is, though.  It's a completely random register picked by Tom
Christiansen years and years ago to hang this feature off of because it
wasn't used for anything else.  From the nroff and man-db perspective,
it's just some random user-defined register, not anything special.

Honestly, there's part of me that just wants to drop this entire feature
from Pod::Man, since I'm dubious that anyone actually runs roffitall more
than once every five years or so, or that it's worth maintaining all this
rather opaque code to support.  But I try to be intensely backward
compatible about Pod::Man.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>