Subject: Re: [PATCH] doc: remove GNU troff workaround

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2023 10:47:56 -0700

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> I'd think 13 years is probably long enough, but I was curious about the
> versions. You referenced the fix here:
>
>> [6] https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/commit/fb553434265906ed81edc6d5f533d0b08d200046
>
> but the earliest tag in that repository that contains that commit is
> 1.79.1 from 2016. However, it seems like that repo is oddly missing
> older tags. You mentioned 1.76 earlier, and the changelog for the Debian
> package of docbook-xsl mentions the 1.76 release fixing it in 2010.

I wondered about the same thing, and did some digging myself
yesterday.  The commit seems to have been merged to their 'master'
branch with the commit 0418c172 (Merge branch 'master' of
../docbook-fixed, 2015-09-20), which is after a curious 5 year gap.

But ...

> So assuming the fix really was released in 2010, even long-running
> distros like CentOS probably would have picked it up within a few years,
> and our workaround should definitely be obsolete by now.

... even if the fixed release was done in 2016, I would say that it
shouldn't be too recent, especially for documentation where we still
give preformatted ones (which I think about dropping once every few
years).