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by mhd 5578 days ago
So they replaced a generic roff system with a specialized man page viewer? Why? I mean, if you're rewriting everything and include a bevvy of output formats, why not make it a proper replacement? Would be quite a bit more unix-y. Yes, maybe a bit more work in the end, but you could always have "oroff 0.1" which only supports a -man subset evolve into a full-fledged implementation. Going from mandoc to "oroff" seems less likely.

(Or I'm just the only one who still occasionally uses ms/tbl/pic…)
3 comments
henryprecheur 5578 days ago
The main reasons for replacing groff were:

1. Groff is buggy

2. Groff is slow to compile & execute

3. Groff is not BSD licensed

mandoc has none of these problems. If you want a "generic" roff system, groff is available as a package.

According to http://mdocml.bsd.lv/

> groff amounts to over 5 MB of source code, most of which is C++ and all of which is GPL. It runs slowly, produces uncertain output, and varies in operation from system to system. mdocml strives to fix this (respectively small, C, ISC-licensed, fast and regular).

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mhd 5578 days ago
Those are reason why you wouldn't use groff, it still doesn't explain why – if you're taking the effort – you're not building a proper roff replacement, but some subset bastard program. And then hack stuff like tbl into the main executable. (Never mind that there's Plan 9 roff or the heirloom version)

I get it, nobody really seems to use non-man roff anymore. Still, subsetting and reinventing the wheel (partially) seems a odd solution for this.

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protomyth 5578 days ago
Resources, need, and code audits are the reason to build a simple tool that does the job you want.
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tedunangst 5578 days ago
Why is reducing the scope of the problem in order to simplify the solution so odd?
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dexen 5578 days ago
This isn't the program you are looking for [[ http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/troff ]]
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__david__ 5578 days ago
> So they replaced a generic roff system with a specialized man page viewer? Why?

Because no one uses roff format for anything other than man pages any more. And even then, it's extremely common to use it only as "object code", output from some higher level/cleaner input format (perldoc, pydoc, docbook/asciidoc). I like that they have high level output formats (pdf, html, ascii) and hope that the package becomes an option in Debian at some point.

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