[__david__]

> 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.