Date: Sun, 21 May 2017 14:57:33 +0200 From: Baptiste Daroussin <bapt@FreeBSD.org> To: arch@freebsd.org Cc: doceng@freebsd.org, doc@FreeBSD.org, current@FreeBSD.org Subject: The futur of the roff toolchain Message-ID: <20170521125733.bmd4tmq6iqpsbvgl@ivaldir.net>
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--7hq7von4owswjfay Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Hi all, I have been working for a while to try to import a modern roff toolchain into base. I didn't like the initial approach that consisted in simply removing all roff toolchain in base. Recap of the situation in base: * We have GNU roff version 1.19.2 in base (latest GPLv2 version). Lots of bug fixes has been made upstream in newer version (GPLv3) in particular regarding unicode but not only. (and we cannot update it anymore) * GNU roff is now only used to generate the documentation in share/doc and as a fallback for manpages which mandoc does not support. On the manpages front: * No manpages in base are not supported by mandoc except groff manpages themselves * man(1) can fallback on ports version of groff if installed (for ports not providing manpages not compatible with mandoc) Alternatives to GNU roff: * Heirloom doctools (which I tried to import) licensed both CDDL/BSD (in C) * neartoff http://litcave.rudi.ir/ BSD licensed (in C) I went the road of using heirloom doctools it is 90% compatible with GNU roff, good enough for all our base roff based documents. After getting down that road for a while, including lots of patches sent upstream (thanks them for being so reactive and integrating them quickly as well as fixing the issues I wasn't able to fix myself quickly). The problem is there are lot of corner small corner cases where heirloom is different from GNU roff and hard to make it compatible. While this is corner cases, it breaks document generation for some large documents people are writing. Those users could use (and actually would benefit a lot from it) GNU roff from the ports tree, but have to be careful about the path of the tool they call to ensure only calling the one from GNU roff and not the one (with the same name) from heirloom doctools. Concerning neatroff it is barely compatible with GNU roff, so not an option (last I tested at least). I would like to change this approach and get back to the initial approach taken by others before I jumped in and I would like just entirely remove the roff toolchain from base and let people rely on GNU roff from ports. man(1) is already asking the user to install groff from ports if the manpage cannot be read with mandoc. No the problem left is documentations available in share/doc. I would like to push them elsewhere. Those documents are mostly useful for historical reason (hence we want to keep them) but not really for daily use of modern FreeBSD. Another issue with those documentation, they are installed as text/ascii version in base, which makes most of them not really readable (as the documents has not be written for a ascii/text target but more for a PDF/html view - using pic(1) for example) A plan was to push as sources in the svn doc repository and continue to build them. This approach also have an issue: over the time roff evolved a bit and while working on heirloom doctools import I had to fix a bunch of markup to make the rendering of those documents clean (also meaning almost noone should read them considering some were not really readable). What I want to propose now, it to render them as PDF (html?) once and push them somewhere (to be defined) as static document on our documentation website. Please doceng@ provide me a location where to push them. And then remove bsd.doc.mk from FreeBSD 12.0 along with the removal of groff. I also want to remove most of roff related tools (the one provided by toolchains available in ports) for which we kept a BSD version (not really maintained in base): namely: - checknr - vgrind - colcrt Only keeping: - col (useful in other places than roff) - soelim (also used for manpages and we have a clean BSD licensed version which is also now parts of mandoc) Best regards, Bapt --7hq7von4owswjfay Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAABCAAdFiEEgOTj3suS2urGXVU3Y4mL3PG3PloFAlkhjrsACgkQY4mL3PG3 Plof0xAAp9HnRo/zDKuaxA9HJrs7XCBnjlC7rquZ2+Jkw5iNhLT1Toc8iA24/bHE IwgTg85oIDfssYwIfElr8QWHMarRHolFcOtypg+i6laF3CTLdRpi9zmVxW0ws7s8 0Tkt1FxwIAuZLLDydC9DXdsblCfvkaY4oMt9/A/62QuE2lsh1QroPRwfhdIhRNgR U+hr/b1s2kkDVNJ7z/cEx8YB/njiZIAtmhqNuVR+Ef37nhMyiuevPVCvuDp8qtu1 1kAvQ6TvII6XlyB15M8l/kf7CPFZt88Jy1Ku3wxwEpRy0t+TXA17kBY3KiS8UMys ANnkChdwIKZv65Vo039zlD2GB+yHCyTG4lD7XAiqnrveLqkADUHhLgzAuhRROYft AiQna1vYt/afXmZv8CcKCZkrd9yFo4kdI1pPgl+6pFovQU6nRTUGTibHyjzpHdGd uCtRt+0hSs0VfRtReFGNd7H7yJAFAesSbvum9au4qAguMq90IVx3yAZe10rFfPX1 fDPoL0JXk/aSSrN/j0blc6y1++pdsjnNIDktOuhyRjEMqVsJvZ8gQxeJSVRJK7Do UudXSxMEFBhUt8MiUv0Y0giUMnTnCKR/iFcgvrkNZ2796pP8p8HXZf30Po2xVKAj fFndsFENUI2VbpsjuPG6cdCAx/EipE1QO3RFWuDu4eTpkOHkNLY= =dx7e -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --7hq7von4owswjfay--
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