Re: groff/-mandoc replacement

[Antti Kantee <pooka%cs.hut.fi@localhost>]

On Sun Mar 01 2009 at 20:14:52 +0000, David Holland wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 09:50:13PM +0200, Antti Kantee wrote:
>  > However, I assume we would have to install groff for just about any 3rd
>  > party package installing manual pages, since they are probably not going
>  > to be in clean mdoc but rather a mix of ``an'' and other roff commands.
>  > What would the command "man" do?  Would it become a frontend trying
>  > to decide which command to execute based on the path the manpage is
>  > found from?
> 
> This is one of the reasons that when I've suggested something like
> this that I've also suggested switching to a different input syntax.
> Then it's much easier to tell what you've got and what tool to use.
> 
> (The other and larger reason is that roff is unnecessarily painful as
> a source language.)

I almost wrote about that in my earlier email, but then decided we can
handle that in another thread later.  But since you brought it up, yes,
I fully agree that switching to a better defined markup format is a
good idea.  However, that takes a lot of effort and me agreeing with
the idea won't make it happen ;)

Plus, I don't think another input format will really affect "man" that
much.  Even currently we could just do: try mdoclint, if it returns an
error, punt to groff.  I think the chances of mdoclint returning success
for non-mdoc is quite small, although knowing roff it's probably non-zero.