Re: Request to reconsider removal of groff from base system

["Kamil Rytarowski" <n54%gmx.com@localhost>]

Greg A. Woods wrote:
> At Tue, 31 Mar 2015 12:24:51 +0100, Gerard Lally <lists+netbsd.users%netmail.ie@localhost> wrote:
> Subject: Request to reconsider removal of groff from base system
> > 
> > As someone who uses groff as a lightweight alternative to TeX and
> > friends**
> 
> I would argue that groff is far from lightweight, even within the
> confines of Troff-like systems.  :-)
> 

Well to not talk about the license and GNU I'm in favor of removing
and never including back groff because it's C++.

If the author is familiar with groff I see the solution in changing
the preferences, but add in providing textproc/groff-minimal to
pkgsrc. Probably with a man page in the NetBSD base with description
what happened to groff, and how to get it back.

Not everybody tracks the ChangeLog, README, Release notes.

Probably the same applies to window(1), today in misc/window.

> If you want a truly lightweight version of Troff you should look at the
> old Mark Williams Company COHERENT version, now freely available:
> 
> 	http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/
> 	http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php
> 
> The full source for their troff and macros also appears to be included
> in their full documentation archive:
> 
> 	http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/doc/doc.tgz
> 
> It is only about 10k lines of C.  Total.  It seems to be trivial to
> build it on NetBSD, and it seems to work too, though I only tried the
> most rudimentary test.  No other goodies though, like pic, eqn, tbl,
> grap, and so on....
> 

You have surprised me.

I was looking at the Coherent sources and planned to cleanup it, extract the
sources and make use of it. There are more goodies like the kernel, C compiler,
documentation.
They are K&R goodies for 286 where e.g. on-line pages are plain .txt files.