path: root/NEWS

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This file lists the most important changes in the mdocml.bsd.lv distribution.

Changes in version 1.13.2, released on December XXX, 2014

    --- MAJOR NEW FEATURES ---
 * Include an implementation of man(1), the manual page viewer.
 * Unified set of command line option, each one supported by all
   command names, including new options -a (format all), -c (no
   pager), -h (synopsis only), and -w (list filenames).
 * Support the MANPAGER and PAGER environment variables.
 * Support gzip'ed manuals by the whole toolset, even as .so targets.
 * Support UTF-8 and Latin-1 input by the whole toolset, delete preconv(1).
 * Switch the default output mode from -Tascii to -Tlocale.
 * Improve -Tascii output for Unicode escape sequences.
 * Let the -Thtml output mode produce polyglot HTML5.
 * Many improvements for eqn(7), in particular in-line equations,
   MathML output in -Thtml mode, and much improved terminal formatting.
    --- PORTABILITY IMPROVEMENTS ---
 * Change the build sequence to the usual ./configure; make; make install.
 * Support ./configure.local for build customizations.
 * Autodetect wchar, sqlite3, and manpath support.
 * Provide a fallback version of fts(3) for systems lacking it.
 * Support choosing alternative binary and manual names.
    --- MINOR NEW FEATURES ---
 * Rudimentary implementation of the e, x, and z tbl(7) layout
   modifiers to equalize, maximize, and ignore the width of columns.
 * Implement font modifiers in tbl(7) layouts.
 * Allow comma-separated options in the tbl(7) options line.
 * Parse and ignore the .pl (page length) roff(7) request.
 * Implement .An -[no]split for the mdoc(7) -Thtml output mode.
 * Support bold italic font in PostScript and PDF output.
 * Warn about commas in function arguments and parentheses in function names.
 * Warn about botched .Xr ordering and punctuation below SEE ALSO.
 * Warn about AUTHORS sections without .An macros.
 * Warn about attempts to call non-callable macros.
 * New developer documentation manual page mandoc_headers(3).
    --- BUGFIXES ---
 * Fix read buffer overrun sometimes triggered by trailing whitespace.
 * Fix read buffer overrun triggered by certain invalid \H sequences.
 * Fix NULL pointer access triggered by .Bl without any arguments.
 * Fix NULL pointer access triggered by .It Nm Fo without .Fc.
 * Fix NULL pointer access triggered by .Sh Xo .Sh without .Xc.
 * Fix NULL pointer access triggered by missing .Nm.
 * Fix an assertion triggered by .It right after .El.
 * Fix an assertion triggered by .Ec without preceding .Eo.
 * Fix an assertion triggered by .Sm or .Db with multiple arguments.
 * Fix assertion failures triggered by very large width arguments.
 * Fix a division by zero in the roff(7) parser.
 * Prevent negative arguments to .ll from causing integer underflow.
 * Correctly autodetect source format even when .Dd is preceded by .ll.
 * Multiple fixes with respect to .Bd and .Bl -offset and -width.
 * Many bugfixes with respect to scaling units.
 * Multiple fixes with respect to delimiter handling by in-line macros.
 * Multiple fixes with respect to .Pf.
 * Make \c work properly in no-fill mode.
 * Stricter syntax checking of Unicode character names.
    --- THANKS TO ---
 * Kristaps Dzonsons for rewriting the eqn(7) parser, implementing
   HTML5 and MathML output, and various other code contributions.
 * Jonathan Gray (OpenBSD) for extensive testing with afl (the
   American Fuzzy Lop security fuzzer) resulting in many bug reports.
 * Anthony Bentley (OpenBSD), Baptiste Daroussin (FreeBSD), Daniel
   Dickman, Doug Hogan, Jason McIntyre, Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD),
   and Martin Natano for source code patches.
 * Carsten Kunze (Heirloom troff), Daniel Levai (Slackware),
   Garrett D'Amore (illumos), Giovanni Becchis, Matthew Dempsky,
   Stuart Henderson, Ted Unangst, Todd Miller (OpenBSD), Thomas
   Klausner (NetBSD), Ulrich Spoerlein (FreeBSD), Justin Haynes,
   Marcus Merighi, Sebastien Marie, Steffen Nurpmeso and Theo Buehler
   for bug reports.

Changes in version 1.13.1, released on August 10, 2014

    --- MAJOR NEW FEATURES ---
 * A complete apropos(1)/makewhatis(8)/man.cgi(8) suite
   based on SQLite3 is now included.
 * The roff(7) parser now provides an almost complete implementation
   of numerical expressions.
 * Warning and error messages have been improved in many ways.
   Almost all fatal errors were downgraded to normal errors and some
   even to warnings.  Almost all messages now mention the macro where
   the issue is detected and many indicate the workaround employed.
   The mandoc(1) manual now includes a list explaining all messages.
    --- MINOR NEW FEATURES ---
 * The roff(7) parser now supports the .ami (append to macro with
   indirectly specified name), .as (append to user-defined
   string), .dei (define macro with indirectly specified name),
   .ll (line length), and .rr (remove register) requests.
 * The roff(7) parser now supports string comparison and numerical
   conditionals in the .if and .ie requests.
 * The roff parser now fully supports the \B (validate numerical
   expression) and partially supports the \w (measure text width)
   escape sequences.
 * The terminal formatter now supports the \: (optional line break)
   escape sequence.
 * The roff parser now supports expansion of user-defined strings
   involving indirect references.
 * The roff(7) parser now handles some pre-defined read-only
   number registers that occur in the pod2man(1) preamble.
 * For backward compatibility, the mdoc(7) parser and formatters
   now support the obsolete macros .En, .Es, .Fr, and .Ot.
 * The mdoc(7) formatter non partially supports .Bd -centered.
 * tbl(7) now handles leading and trailing vertical lines.
 * The build system now provides fallback versions of strcasestr(3)
   and strsep(3) for systems lacking them.
 * The mdoc(7) manual now explains how various standards
   supported by the .St macro are related to each other.
    --- BUGFIXES ---
 * In the roff(7) parser, several bugs were fixed with respect
   to closing conditional blocks on macro lines.
 * Parsing of roff(7) identifiers and escape sequences was improved
   in multiple respects.
 * In the mdoc(7) parser, the handling of defective document
   prologues was improved in multiple ways.
 * The mdoc(7) parser no longer skips content before the first section
   header, and it no longer deletes non-.% content from .Rs blocks.
 * In the mdoc(7) parser, a crash was fixed related to weird .Sh headers.
 * In the mdoc(7) parser, handling of .Sm with missing or invalid
   arguments was corrected.
 * In the mdoc(7) parser, trailing punctuation at the end of partial
   implicit macros no longer triggers end-of-sentence spacing.
 * In the terminal formatter, two crashes were fixed: one triggered by
   excessive indentation and another by excessively long .Nm arguments.
 * In the terminal formatter, a floating point rounding bug was
   fixed that sometimes caused an off-by-one error in indentation.
 * In the UTF-8 formatter, rendering of accents, breakable hyphens,
   and non-breakable spaces was corrected.
 * In the HTML formatter, encoding of special characters was
   corrected in multiple respects.
 * In the mdoc(7) formatter, rendering of .Ex and .Rv was
   improved for various edge cases.
 * In the mdoc(7) formatter, handling of empty .Bl -inset item
   heads was improved.
 * In the man(7) formatter, some bugs were fixed with respect
   to same-line detection in the context of .TP and .nf macros,
   and the indentation of .IP and .TP blocks was improved.
 * The mandoc(3) library no longer prints to stderr.
    --- THANKS TO ---
   Abhinav Upadhyay (NetBSD), Andreas Voegele, Anthony Bentley (OpenBSD),
   Christian Weisgerber (OpenBSD), Havard Eidnes (NetBSD), Jan Stary,
   Jason McIntyre (OpenBSD), Jeremie Courreges-Anglas (OpenBSD),
   Joerg Sonnenberger (NetBSD), Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado (OpenBSD),
   Marc Espie (OpenBSD), Matthias Scheler (NetBSD), Pascal Stumpf (OpenBSD),
   Paul Onyschuk (Alpine Linux), Sebastien Marie, Steffen Nurpmeso,
   Stuart Henderson (OpenBSD), Ted Unangst (OpenBSD), Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD),
   Thomas Klausner (NetBSD), and Ulrich Spoerlein (FreeBSD)
   for reporting bugs and missing features.

Changes in version 1.12.3, released on December 31, 2013

 * In the mdoc(7) SYNOPSIS, line breaks and hanging indentation
   now work correctly for .Fo/.Fa/.Fc and .Fn blocks.
   Thanks to Franco Fichtner for doing part of the work.
 * The mdoc(7) .Bk macro got some addititonal bugfixes.
 * In mdoc(7) macro arguments, double quotes can now be quoted
   by doubling them, just like in man(7).
   Thanks to Tsugutomo ENAMI for the patch.
 * At the end of man(7) macro lines, end-of-sentence spacing
   now works.  Thanks to Franco Fichtner for the patch.
 * For backward compatibility, the man(7) parser now supports the
   man-ext .UR/.UE (uniform resource identifier) block macros.
 * The man(7) parser now handles closing blocks that are not open
   more gracefully.
 * The man(7) parser now ignores blank lines right after .SH and .SS.
 * In the man(7) formatter, reset indentation when leaving a block,
   not just when entering the next one.
 * The roff(7) .nr request now supports incrementing and decrementing
   number registers and stops parsing the number right before the
   first non-digit character.
 * The roff(7) parser now supports the alternative escape sequence
   syntax \C'uXXXX' for Unicode characters.
 * The roff(7) parser now parses and ignores the .fam (font family)
   and .hw (hyphenation points) requests and the \d and \u escape
   sequences.
 * The roff(7) manual got a new ESCAPE SEQUENCE REFERENCE.

Changes in version 1.12.2, released on Oktober 5, 2013

 * The mdoc(7) to man(7) converter, to be called as mandoc -Tman,
   is now fully functional.
 * The mandoc(1) utility now supports the -Ios (default operating system)
   input option, and the -Tutf8 output mode now actually works.
 * The mandocdb(8) utility no longer truncates existing databases when
   starting to build new ones, but only replaces them when the build
   actually succeeds.
 * The man(7) parser now supports the PD macro (paragraph distance),
   and (for GNU man-ext compatibility only) EX (example block) and EE
   (example end).  Plus several bugfixes regarding indentation, line
   breaks, and vertical spacing, and regarding RS following TP.
 * The roff(7) parser now supports the \f(BI (bold+italic) font escape,
   the \z (zero cursor advance) escape and the cc (change control
   character) and it (input line trap) requests. Plus bugfixes regarding
   the \t (tab) escape, nested escape sequences, and conditional requests.
 * In mdoc(7), several bugs were fixed related to UTF-8 output of quoting
   enclosures, delimiter handling, list indentation and horizontal and
   vertical spacing, formatting of the Lk, %U, and %C macros, plus some
   bugfixes related to the handling of syntax errors like badly nested
   font blocks, stray Ta macros outside column lists, unterminated It Xo
   blocks, and non-text children of Nm blocks.
 * In tbl(7), the width of horizontal spans and the vertical spacing
   around tables was corrected, and in man(7) files, a crash was fixed
   that was triggered by some particular unclosed T{ macros.
 * For mandoc developers, we now provide a tbl(3) library manual and
   gmdiff, a very small, very simplistic groff-versus-mandoc output
   comparison tool.
 * Provide this NEWS file.

Changes in version 1.12.1, released on March 23, 2012

 * Significant work on apropos(1) and mandocdb(8). These tools are now
   much more robust.  A whatis(1) implementation is now handled as an
   apropos(1) mode.  These tools are also able to minimally handle
   pre-formatted pages, that is, those already formatted by another
   utility such as GNU troff.
 * The man.cgi(7) script is also now available for wider testing.
   It interfaces with mandocdb(8) manuals cached by catman(8).
   HTML output is generated on-the-fly by libmandoc or internal
   methods to convert pre-formatted pages.
 * The mailing list archive for the discuss and tech lists are being
   hosted by Gmane at gmane.comp.tools.mdocml.user and
   gmane.comp.tools.mdocml.devel, respectively.

Changes in version 1.12.0, released on October 8, 2011

 * This version features a new, work-in-progress mandoc(1) output mode:
   -Tman.  This mode allows a system maintainer to distribute man(7)
   media for older systems that may not natively support mdoc(7), such
   as old Solaris systems.
 * The -Ofragment option was added to mandoc(1)'s -Thtml and -Txhtml modes.
 * While adding features, an apropos(1) utility has been merged from the
   mandoc-tools sandbox.  This interfaces with mandocdb(8) for semantic
   search of manual content.  apropos(1) is different from the traditional
   apropos primarily in allowing keyword search (such as for functions,
   utilities, etc.) and regular expressions.  Note that the calling
   syntax for apropos is likely to change as it settles down.
 * In documentation news, the mdoc(7) and man(7) manuals have been
   made considerably more readable by adding MACRO OVERVIEW sections, by
   moving the gory details of the LANGUAGE SYNTAX to the roff(7) manual,
   and by moving the very technical MACRO SYNTAX sections down to the
   bottom of the page.
 * Furthermore, for tbl(7), the -Tascii mode horizontal spacing of tables
   was rewritten completely.  It is now compatible with groff(1), both
   with and without frames and rulers.
 * Nesting of indented blocks is now supported in man(7), and several
   bugs were fixed regarding indentation and alignment.
 * The page headers in mdoc(7) are now nicer for very long titles.

Changes in version 1.11.7, released on September 2, 2011

 * Added demandoc(1) utility for stripping away macros and escapes.
   This replaces the historical deroff(1) utility.
 * Also improved the mdoc(7) and man(7) manuals.

Changes in version 1.11.6, released on August 16, 2011

 * Handling of tr macro in roff(7) implemented.  This makes Perl
   documentation much more readable.  Hyphenation is also now enabled in
   man(7) format documents.  Many other general improvements have been
   implemented.

Changes in version 1.11.5, released on July 24, 2011

 * Significant eqn(7) improvements.  mdocml can now parse arbitrary eqn
   input (although few GNU extensions are accepted, nor is mixing
   low-level roff with eqn).  See the eqn(7) manual for details.
   For the time being, equations are rendered as simple in-line text.
   The equation parser satisfies the language specified in the
   Second Edition User's Guide:
   http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/v7man/eqn/eqn2e.ps

Changes in version 1.11.4, released on July 12, 2011

 * Bug-fixes and clean-ups across all systems, especially in mandocdb(8)
   and the man(7) parser.  This release was significantly assisted by
   participants in OpenBSD's c2k11.  Thanks!

Changes in version 1.11.3, released on May 26, 2011

 * Introduce locale-encoding of output with the -Tlocale output option and
   Unicode escaped-character input.  See mandoc(1) and mandoc_char(7),
   respectively, for details.  This allows for non-ASCII characters (e.g.,
   \[u5000]) to be rendered in the locale's encoding, if said environment
   supports wide-character encoding (if it does not, -Tascii is used
   instead).  Locale support can be turned off at compile time by removing
   -DUSE_WCHAR in the Makefile, in which case -Tlocale is always a synonym
   for -Tascii.
 * Furthermore, multibyte-encoded documents, such as those in UTF-8, may
   be on-the-fly recoded into mandoc(1) input by using the newly-added
   preconv(1) utility.  Note: in the future, this feature may be
   integrated into mandoc(1).

Changes in version 1.11.2, released on May 12, 2011

 * Corrected some installation issues in version 1.11.1.
 * Further migration to libmandoc.
 * Initial public release (this utility is very much under development)
   of mandocdb(8).  This utility produces keyword databases of manual
   content, which features semantic querying of manual content.

Changes in version 1.11.1, released on April 4, 2011

 * The earlier libroff, libmdoc, and libman soup have been merged into
   a single library, libmandoc, which manages all aspects of parsing
   real manuals, from line-handling to tbl(7) parsing.
 * As usual, many general fixes and improvements have also occurred.
   In particular, a great deal of redundancy and superfluous code has
   been removed with the merging of the backend libraries.
 * see also the changes in 1.10.10

Changes in version 1.10.10, March 20, 2011, NOT released

 * Initial eqn(7) functionality is in place.  For the time being,
   this is limited to the recognition of equation blocks;
   future version of mdocml will expand upon this framework.

Changes in version 1.10.9, released on January 7, 2011

 * Many back-end fixes have been implemented: argument handling (quoting),
   man(7) improvements, error/warning classes, and many more.
 * Initial tbl(7) functionality (see the "TS", "TE", and "T&" macros in
   the roff(7) manual) has been merged from tbl.bsd.lv.  Output is still
   minimal, especially for -Thtml and -Txhtml, but manages to at least
   display data.  This means that mandoc(1) now has built-in support
   for two troff preprocessors via libroff: soelim(1) and tbl(1).

Changes in version 1.10.8, released on December 24, 2010

 * Overhauled the -Thtml and -Txhtml output modes.  They now display
   readable output in arbitrary browsers, including text-based ones like
   lynx(1).  See HTML and XHTML manuals in the DOCUMENTATION section
   for examples.  Attention: available style-sheet classes have been
   considerably changed!  See the example.style.css file for details.
   Lastly, libmdoc and libman have been cleaned up and reduced in size
   and complexity.
 * see also the changes in 1.10.7

Changes in version 1.10.7, December 6, 2010, NOT released

 Significant improvements merged from OpenBSD downstream, including:
 * many new roff(7) components,
 * in-line implementation of troff's soelim(1),
 * broken-block handling,
 * overhauled error classifications, and
 * cleaned up handling of error conditions.

Changes in version 1.10.6, released on September 27, 2010

 * Calling conventions for mandoc(1) have changed: -W improved and -f
   deprecated.
 * Non-ASCII characters are also now uniformly discarded.
 * Lots of documentation improvements.
 * Many incremental fixes accomodating for groff's more interesting
   productions.
 * Lastly, pod2man(1) preambles are now fully accepted after some
   considerable roff(7) and special character support.

Changes in version 1.10.5, released on July 27, 2010

 * Primarily a bug-fix and polish release, but including -Tpdf support
   in mandoc(1) by way of "Summer of Code".  Highlights:
 * fix "Sm" and "Bd" handling
 * fix end-of-sentence handling for embedded sentences
 * polish man(7) documentation
 * document all mdoc(7) macros
 * polish mandoc(1) -Tps output
 * lots of internal clean-ups in character escapes
 * un-break literal contexts in man(7) documents
 * improve -Thtml output for -man
 * add mandoc(1) -Tpdf support

Changes in version 1.10.4, released on July 12, 2010

 * Lots of features developed during both "Summer of Code" and the
   OpenBSD c2k10 hackathon:
 * minimal "ds" roff(7) symbols are supported
 * beautified SYNOPSIS section output
 * acceptance of scope-block breakage in mdoc(7)
 * clarify error message status
 * many minor bug-fixes and formatting issues resolved
 * see also changes in 1.10.3

Changes in version 1.10.3, June 29, 2010, NOT released

 * variable font-width and paper-size support in mandoc(1) -Tps output
 * "Bk" mdoc(7) support

Changes in version 1.10.2, released on June 19, 2010

 * Small release featuring text-decoration in -Tps output,
   a few minor relaxations of errors, and some optimisations.

Changes in version 1.10.1, released on June 7, 2010

 * This primarily focusses on the "Bl" and "It" macros described in
   mdoc(7).  Multi-line column support is now fully compatible with groff,
   as are implicit list entries for columns.
 * Removed manuals(7) in favour of http://manpages.bsd.lv.
 * The way we handle the SYNOPSIS section (see the SYNOPSIS documentation
   in MANUAL STRUCTURE) has also been considerably simplified compared
   to groff's method.
 * Furthermore, the -Owidth=width output option has been added to -Tascii,
   see mandoc(1).
 * Lastly, initial PostScript output has been added with the -Tps option
   to mandoc(1).  It's brutally simple at the moment: fixed-font, with no
   font decorations.

Changes in version 1.10.0, released on May 29, 2010

 * Release consisting of the results from the m2k10 hackathon and up-merge
   from OpenBSD.  This requires a significant note of thanks to Ingo
   Schwarze (OpenBSD) and Joerg Sonnenberger (NetBSD) for their hard work,
   and again to Joerg for hosting m2k10.  Highlights (mostly cribbed from
   Ingo's m2k10 report) follow in no particular order:
 * a libroff preprocessor in front of libmdoc and libman stripping out
   roff(7) instructions;
 * end-of-sentence (EOS) detection in free-form and macro lines;
 * correct handling of tab-separated columnar lists in mdoc(7);
 * improved main calling routines to optionally use mmap(3) for better
   performance;
 * cleaned up exiting when invoked as -Tlint or over multiple files
   with -fign-errors;
 * error and warning message handling re-written to be unified for
   libroff, libmdoc, and libman;
 * handling of badly-nested explicit-scoped macros;
 * improved free-form text parsing in libman and libmdoc;
 * significant GNU troff compatibility improvements in -Tascii,
   largely in terms of spacing;
 * a regression framework for making sure the many fragilities of GNU
   troff aren't trampled in subsequent work;
 * support for -Tascii breaking at hyphens encountered in free-form text;
 * and many more minor fixes and improvements

Changes in version 1.9.25, released on May 13, 2010

 * Fixed handling of "\*(Ba" escape.
 * Backed out -fno-ign-chars (pointless complexity).
 * Fixed erroneous breaking of literal lines.
 * Fixed SYNOPSIS breaking lines before non-initial macros.
 * Changed default section ordering.
 * Most importantly, the framework for end-of-sentence double-spacing is
   in place, now implemented for the "end-of-sentence, end-of-line" rule.
 * This is a stable roll-back point before the mandoc hackathon in Rostock!

Changes in version 1.9.24, released on May 9, 2010

 * Rolled back break-at-hyphen.
 * -DUGLY is now the default (no feature splits!).
 * Free-form text is not de-chunked any more: lines are passed
   whole-sale into the front-end, including whitespace.
 * Added mailing lists.

Changes in version 1.9.23, released on April 7, 2010

 * mdocml has been linked to the OpenBSD build.
 * This version incorporates many small changes, mostly from patches
   by OpenBSD, allowing crufty manuals to slip by with warnings instead
   of erroring-out.
 * Some subtle semantic issues, such as punctuation scope, have also
   been fixed.
 * Lastly, some issues with -Thtml have been fixed, which prompted an
   update to the online manual pages style layout.

Changes in version 1.9.22, released on March 31, 2010

 * Adjusted merge of the significant work by Ingo Schwarze
   in getting "Xo" blocks (block full implicit, e.g., "It"
   for non-columnar lists) to work properly.  This isn't
   enabled by default: you must specify -DUGLY as a compiler
   flag (see the Makefile for details).

Changes in version 1.9.20, released on March 30, 2010

 * More efforts to get roff instructions in man(7) documents under
   control.  Note that roff instructions embedded in line-scoped,
   next-line macros (e.g. "B") are not supported.
 * Leading punctuation for mdoc(7) macros, such as "Fl ( ( a",
   are now correctly handled.

Changes in version 1.9.18, released on March 27, 2010

 * Many fixes (largely pertaining to scope)
   and improvements (e.g., handling of apostrophe-control macros,
   which fixes the strange "BR" seen in some macro output)
   to handling roff instructions in man(7) documents.

Changes in version 1.9.17, released on March 25, 2010

 * Accept perlpod(1) standard preamble.
 * Also accept (and discard) "de", "dei", "am", "ami", and "ig"
   roff macro blocks.

Changes in version 1.9.16, released on March 22, 2010

 * Inspired by patches and bug reports by Ingo Schwarze,
   allowed man(7) to accept non-printing elements to be nested
   within next-line scopes, such as "br" within "B" or "TH",
   which is valid roff.
 * Longsoon architecture also noted and Makefile cleaned up.

Changes in version 1.9.15, released on February 18, 2010

 * Moved to our new BSD.lv home.
 * XHTML is now an acceptable output mode for mandoc(1);
 * "Xr" made more compatible with groff;
 * "Vt" fixed when invoked in SYNOPSIS;
 * "\\" escape removed;
 * end-of-line white-space detected for all lines;
 * subtle bug fixed in list display for some modes;
 * compatibility layer checked in for compilation in diverse
   UNIX systems;
 * and column lengths handled correctly.

For older releases, see the ChangeLog files
in http://mdocml.bsd.lv/snapshots/ .