Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jrockway 5575 days ago
Probably a good choice. For a workstation, you might encounter the need for a typesetting system. But for your router, you probably don't need it. So I think OpenBSD made the right choice about what to ship in core.
1 comments

troff is technically a general-purpose typesetting system, but how many people are still using it for anything other than formatting man pages? (La)TeX and other formats have pretty much taken over.
Indeed. I hope Linux distributions will follow with replacing Groff. It's a huge, slow, ancient system and for the purpose of formatting manpages it can be replaced by a 15-line Python script.

(this has nothing to do with C++ versus C, simply with removing some bloated UNIX legacy code)

Well, 15 lines is a bit optimistic. mandoc is ~25 000 lines of C, and not yet complete.
I was figuratively speaking. In Python it'd be less lines than C, but still a substantial project.