On Fri, Mar 09, 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote: > > I wholeheartedly support eliminating the stripper. It's an > unnecessary step that complicates understanding and maintaining > the distribution package. And to an even greater degree it > obfuscates code that users (who have no interest in the arcana > of maintenance) may want to consult to unravel fine points or > bugs in macro packages. The only argument for stripping is > a supposed efficiency gain, which I suspect is too minute to > matter.
Truth is, it's much easier for me if om.tmac isn't stripped. I help users off list who sometimes want to do non-standard things with mom that involve site-specific changes to the file. If the user has only a distro-packaged groff, their om.tmac is the stripped one. For the purpose, it's nearly unusable, lacking even rudimentary indenting. I generally tell them to download the tarball from the mom website so we're working on the same page, so to speak. It's a helluva lot easier than telling them to pull the sources, grab om.tmac-u, and plug it into their system as om.tmac, but it would be even easier if I could tell them simply to open the installed (indented and commented) om.tmac. -- Peter Schaffter http://www.schaffter.ca
