Re: groff & NetBSD & relevance (was Re: Re: Re: Request to reconsider removal of groff from base system)

[Dave Huang <khym%azeotrope.org@localhost>]

On Apr 8, 2015, at 13:16, David Young <dyoung%pobox.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Apr 07, 2015 at 11:27:02AM +0000, Ron Swiernik wrote:
>> Again this is an enhancement? Can mandoc handle tbl and pic input?
>> 
>> UNIX has had the *roff tool suite for a long time. A text formatter is how they
>> got support from management to continue work on UNIX. I doubt we would be
>> talking about UNIX today if it wasn't for the suite.
> 
> ... but it seems to me that neither *roff nor an MS Office
> knock-off will buy UNIX much relevance in 2015.  What's next?

Agreed. In my ~20 years of using NetBSD, I've used *roff for something 
other than formatting manpages maybe twice (it was to format the stuff 
in /usr/share/doc, and only because I was curious to read them, not 
because I really needed them). I don't get the resistance to move 
things to pkgsrc. If nroff is important to you, grab the binary package 
and install it--nobody's saying that you won't be able to use it.

The rest of the world isn't going to flock to NetBSD because it still 
has a text formatter that uses .commands as inline markup.
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