Hi, this mail is to inform you that i have just taken up maintainership of groff in OpenBSD (www.openbsd.org), have updated the OpenBSD groff port to release 1.21, have subscribed to the three groff mailing lists at GNU.org and am planning to keep the OpenBSD groff port up to date in a timely manner starting now.
Even though we are now using mandoc (mdocml.bsd.lv) to format base system manuals, groff remains a crucial piece of software for OpenBSD. It continues to be the standard software for general roff typesetting, and even for formatting manuals, thousands of ports continue to rely on it. Though some ports will probably switch to mandoc, many will not, in particular those using GNU extensions or non-mdoc(7), non-man(7) macro packages mandoc does not support. Besides, we are using groff as the de-facto standard roff reference implementation for mandoc development. That is, even regarding details of implementation-dependent parser and renderer behaviour, we try to avoid diverging from groff/grotty behaviour unless there are very good reasons to do so, in exceptional cases. In particular, i'm routinely running automated bulk comparisons of grotty and mandoc output before changing mandoc source code, in order to prevent gratuitious differences and incompatibilities. Porting groff-1.21 was rather straightforward, i builds cleanly nearly out of the box. The two minor build system issues we encountered have already been reported to bugs-groff@ by Christian Weisgerber. The remaining patches - see http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/textproc/groff/patches/ are mainly OpenBSD idiosyncracies irrelevant upstream. Probably, i should try to clean up most of them in the future. The following two contrib/ patches might be interesting for you; they contain a short comment explaining the respective problem: * patch-contrib_groffer_Makefile_sub * patch-contrib_hdtbl_Makefile_sub (This one will definitely need a different fix upstream, in case you see a problem there.) Just ignore the other patches... Thanks a lot for having kept the roff language alive and maintained all those years, and for your continuing development of groff! Yours, Ingo
