Follow-up Comment #22, bug #66583 (group groff): The following remarks really apply to bug #66611, but as they're in response to a comment here, I'm posting them here.
[comment #21 comment #21:]
> the rest of the documents [...] also
> serve as integration tests of functional code being shipped.
...
> If a groff build fails in producing
> its documentation, I want to hear from people who observe it;
These are valid concerns to groff's maintainers.
They may not be concerns to every user. Someone building groff on a
reasonably conformant Linux system can be reasonably sure it will build
correctly, and might reasonably be willing to forgo the extra checks these
integration tests provide.
The project should accommodate the needs of its diverse user base, not just
the things that are most beneficial to its own development team.
(One could question how widespread demand is for groff without documentation,
and conclude that the maintenance cost to the limited development team is too
high to justify meeting this minimal demand. But that's a separate issue from
all the above.)
> we might remind ourselves that groff, as a typesetting
> application, _is a system for creating documentation_.
It is, more often than that, a system for _reading_ documentation. A sizable
number of its users will never write anything in it. Some will never even be
aware they're using it when they type "man".
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