Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Hi Charlie,
All they're doing is putting mdocml in base to handle manpages.
http://mdocml.bsd.lv/
DESCRIPTION
mdocml is a suite of tools compiling "-mdoc", the roff macro
package
of choice for BSD manual pages, and "-man", the predominant
historical package for UNIX manuals. The mission of mdocml is to
deprecate groff, the GNU roff implementation, for displaying -mdoc
pages whilst providing token support for -man.
Why? groff amounts to over 5 MB of source code, most of which
is C++
and all of which is GPL. It runs slowly, produces uncertain
output,
and varies in operation from system to system. mdocml strives
to fix
this (respectively small, C, ISC-licensed, fast and regular).
"uncertain output"?
That's just one lump in a whole basket full of bizarre. The following
is really directed at the mdocml dude…
> over 5 MB of source code
Um… there are these things called "hard drives" that you really need
to look into. Seriously, I compiled groff a while back on a 486-based
Linux box with a 110MB (that's MB, not GB) drive, which had about
80MB available for the OS once the MS-DOG & swap partitions got their
share. And that was the full-zoot groff, not some "base environment."
> most of which is C++ and all of which is GPL
I understand some folks are allergic to GPL, but I fail to see what
the problem is with C++. Yeah, it took a while to compile groff on
that 486, but it takes a while to do *anything* on a 486.
> It runs slowly
And that statement pretty much casts everything else you say into
question. "Runs slowly" compared to what? I haven't found any general-
purpose formatter that even comes close to groff, speed-wise, and
don't get me started on GUI tools. Some Unix deployments had a
"catman" directory with pre-formatted (ASCII) manpages... but are
there really general-use systems out there these days that are so
slow, even the overhead for processing a manpage is too much to bear?
Embedded systems, sure, but who's reading manpages on them?
> produces uncertain output
At this point, I'm convinced that the author has never used groff.
> varies in operation from system to system
Really? I have my work environment set up on MacOSX, Linux, and a
Dozebox running Cygwin. Works exactly the same on each box. It's
taking a little work to get it going on GnuWin32, but that's because
I have to port the support scripts.
Sorry about the rant, but I can't let this disinformation pass
unchallenged.
Larry
