From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Tue May 25 23:33:33 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1E6B21065675 for ; Tue, 25 May 2010 23:33:33 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from bakul@bitblocks.com) Received: from mail.bitblocks.com (bitblocks.com [64.142.15.60]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 002F28FC0C for ; Tue, 25 May 2010 23:33:32 +0000 (UTC) Received: from bitblocks.com (localhost.bitblocks.com [127.0.0.1]) by mail.bitblocks.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id C88115B30; Tue, 25 May 2010 16:16:11 -0700 (PDT) To: Eitan Adler In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 26 May 2010 01:21:20 +0300." References: <201005251450.o4PEo9tF099503@fire.js.berklix.net> <4BFC004F.1090101@elischer.org> <4BFC00E7.1060307@feral.com> Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 16:16:10 -0700 From: Bakul Shah Message-Id: <20100525231611.C88115B30@mail.bitblocks.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Matthew Jacob Subject: Re: GSoC: BSD text tools X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 23:33:33 -0000 On Wed, 26 May 2010 01:21:20 +0300 Eitan Adler wrote: > On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Matthew Jacob wrote: > > On 5/25/2010 9:52 AM, Julian Elischer wrote: > >> > >> On 5/25/10 8:33 AM, Eitan Adler wrote: > >>>> > >>>> No. Do not remove groff or associated tools from /usr/src ! > >>>> Roff has been in Unix /usr/src since '77 or earlier. > >>>> A lot of people use tools from that descendancy as production tools. > >>> > >>> So? If it isn't a very commonly used tool and isn't necessary for 99% > >>> of cases I don't seem the harm of removing it from base and making it > >>> a port? > >> > >> BSD has always =C2=A0been ab;e to produce it's documentation as part of = > its > >> build > >> > >> Please keep this true. > > > This is what mdocml will be for. I never advocated removing the > utilities required for building documentation from the base - just the > soon to be superfluous groff utility (once the GSOC project is done). mdocml handles -mdoc and -man but not other formats. There are documents in /usr/src/share/doc needing -ms and -me etc. groff can't be replaced with mdocml. If you must kick groff out, why not "port" plan9 troff which now does unicode, has 27 macro packages including ms, weighs in at about 10K lines of C code written by Joe Ossanna, Brian Kernighan, Ken Thompson, Jaap Akkerhuis & others, is now open source (subject to Lucent Public License), and traces its lineage back to Joe Ossanna's original troff? There is also pic, tbl, eqn and grap (for drawing graphs). Also troff2html. AFAIK plan9 troff doesn't do dvi but I think most people can live with that. All of these already work under FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS & others as part of Plan 9 from User space. Integrating them into FreeBSD base is bound to be far easier than replicating its functionality. See http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/troff.pdf for troff details, http://www.swtch.com/plan9port for Plan9 from User Space.