Re: Request to reconsider removal of groff from base system

[Dan LaBell <dan4l-nospam%verizon.net@localhost>]

The GNU approach for groff, was to treat all the
incompatibilities of the various nroff's as features
and support them  -- 'A ONE RING APPROACH'.
Of course, now documents are made on GNU-LINUX systems,
and there is no reason for anyone to remember which
features of the language provided by groff, are really
unique to groff.  AND, now any issue that could be
resolved possibly, even remotely, by installing LINUX,
is a reason, to promote LINUX. ( And, of course, GNU is
blameless,since they promote InfoTeX, which modern, and
not 'roff which is archaic; which was made with the
compromises they had to make because of the low-memory
systems they had; and, they provide the command line
reader 'info' ;-)

Currently, I'm recovering the filesystems on my
NAS Linux toaster, and found, I couldn't read man
pages, naturally I used other computers, the web
CGI/BIN man reader stuff, and lot of scribbled
and scrawled notes, and was productive for about
a day.  And, after a day of rest, I was able
to mount 2 linux tmpfs filesystems on both /tmp,
and /root, and set up keys for root, so I could
push, or pull files, with sftp and scp freely.

After, that I still felt the lack of man pages,
so I dug up, something that I had downloaded from
UUnet's comp.sources archive, an awk based man
pager formatter, which was trivial to adapt
to use in place of; or, instead of man.
And, it was a godsend, as far productively goes.

So, the moral is, it is possible to use awk here,
and they are books for AWK, even courses on AWK.
So, perhaps, that would be a worth wile project for
a University to espouse.