Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 09:46:56 -0700 From: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Eitan Adler <lists@eitanadler.com>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GSoC: BSD text tools Message-ID: <20100526164656.C68875B2E@mail.bitblocks.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 26 May 2010 16:54:35 %2B1000." <20100526065435.GE11076@dereel.lemis.com> References: <AANLkTik90k1HlsDJsIgRhCnAcU8_ympR15ZJcoL07A5m@mail.gmail.com> <201005251450.o4PEo9tF099503@fire.js.berklix.net> <AANLkTikz2m7LS0DC4i7tKFSHQIyZuCKSxiHWlyTHClhs@mail.gmail.com> <4BFC004F.1090101@elischer.org> <4BFC00E7.1060307@feral.com> <AANLkTik6VBPCSiL4QlHpa5Tbt8PxlYnx2US5FkRGIHkl@mail.gmail.com> <20100525231611.C88115B30@mail.bitblocks.com> <20100526065435.GE11076@dereel.lemis.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Wed, 26 May 2010 16:54:35 +1000 Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> wrote: > On Tuesday, 25 May 2010 at 16:16:10 -0700, Bakul Shah wrote: > > > > 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. > > This sounds too good to be true. I'd certainly be in favour of such a > change, *if* it proves feasible. pkg_add -r plan9port to play with these programs. People who use *roff a lot should satisfy themselves p9p versions meet their needs. [p9p has a lot of other goodies worth nibbling on] There are two issues in integrating with BSD: licensing and the amount of effort required. For licensing issues a good place to start would be to look at /usr/local/plan9/LICENSE (once you install the p9p port). For what it's worth, my sense is that the relevant licenses should allow bundling with *BSD but I am not a lawyer. As for effort, p9p has already made the changes needed to allow compiling with gcc (plan9 C is not std C but close enough). p9p programs rely on a porting layer that emulates some of plan9 environment. If these porting/ported libraries are imported into BSD, porting is almost a trivial task. If you just want troff&co, I suspect one would need a small subset of these libraries. Only one way to find out!
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20100526164656.C68875B2E>