On 2025-08-27 16:42, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

I sent this to tz@iana.org a few days ago, but it appears to have gotten discarded, maybe because I am not subscribed to the list.

Yes, it's August and I suspect mailing list reviewers are on vacation. For tz list readers: Branden's original email is archived here: https://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2025-08/msg00041.html

I have a suggestion for accomplishing all of the tasks named in the Subject with command-line options to (recent) nroff. If I understand the "workman.sh" script correctly, all that would be left for your pipeline is to strip a trailing blank line.

Thanks for the suggestion. As TZDB has been shipping *.txt files with single header and trailer lines for some time, I think we can simply prefer that style now for groff; this removes the need to strip a trailing blank line. For traditional nroff the best we can easily do is omit all headers and trailers, to avoid irritating headers elsewhere.

You might find it more convenient to use command-line options than to append to macro definitions and otherwise inject *roff into nroff's input stream (which is interpreted only after the macro package is loaded, a fact that will have important consequences in groff 1.24).

Thanks for the suggestion. Although this assumes groff we can do it just for groff (and for mandoc) and continue to do things the traditional way on old-fashioned (by now, very old-fashioned) hosts. I installed the attached proposed patches to implement your suggestion and a bit more.