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

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Apr 08, 2015 at 01:16:06PM -0500, David Young wrote:
> 
> Document preparation is important.  Deleting the only or best document
> preparation system in NetBSD (supposing that is even what's going on)
> is pretty lame, but it seems to me that neither *roff nor an MS Office
> knock-off will buy UNIX much relevance in 2015.  What's next?

Deleting the only thing we have that can format some of the design and user
documentation *included in the source tree* is even more lame.

It's not okay to make system builds require external tools, from my point
of view, and extremely questionable to rip documentation out of the source
tree or disable its build so we can remove a single tool.

To me, the simplest and most elegant solution would look to be replacing
groff with heirloom troff as the formatter for what we have that isn't
mandoc.

(I would not complain if other obnoxious uses of C++, particularly newly
added ones that greatly increase build time, left our tree, on the other
hand...)

Thor