From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Wed May 26 16:46:59 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 EB14B106566C for ; Wed, 26 May 2010 16:46:59 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from bakul@bitblocks.com) Received: from mail.bitblocks.com (mail.bitblocks.com [64.142.15.60]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 554AF8FC0A for ; Wed, 26 May 2010 16:46:59 +0000 (UTC) Received: from bitblocks.com (localhost.bitblocks.com [127.0.0.1]) by mail.bitblocks.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id C68875B2E; Wed, 26 May 2010 09:46:56 -0700 (PDT) To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 26 May 2010 16:54:35 +1000." <20100526065435.GE11076@dereel.lemis.com> References: <201005251450.o4PEo9tF099503@fire.js.berklix.net> <4BFC004F.1090101@elischer.org> <4BFC00E7.1060307@feral.com> <20100525231611.C88115B30@mail.bitblocks.com> <20100526065435.GE11076@dereel.lemis.com> Comments: In-reply-to Greg 'groggy' Lehey message dated "Wed, 26 May 2010 16:54:35 +1000." Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 09:46:56 -0700 From: Bakul Shah Message-Id: <20100526164656.C68875B2E@mail.bitblocks.com> Cc: Eitan Adler , freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org 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: Wed, 26 May 2010 16:47:00 -0000 On Wed, 26 May 2010 16:54:35 +1000 Greg 'groggy' Lehey 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!