Hi folks, I have sad, but old, news to report. Consequent to the GNU project tidying up their maintainer records for groff (as of 7 September it became official--the hot potato is in my lap now), some of their staff raised questions about Ted Harding's status.
Back in 1999, Werner Lemberg and Ted Harding succeeded James Clark as GNU's groff maintainers after a vacancy of about four years. As I understand it, the arrangement was that Werner would mostly handle the programming side and Ted would handle user support. That seems to have worked well for many years. But eventually their levels of participation dropped and Bertrand Garrigues succeeded the Werner/Ted team as sole groff maintainer in about September 2017.[1] While Werner is still around and reliably responds on the occasions I feel the desperate need to light the bat signal, we unfortunately haven't heard from Ted in a long time. And that sadly turns out to be for the worst reason. https://groups.google.com/g/MedStats/c/9pIZjqi2nKY?pli=1 Among many other contributions, Ted wrote an excellent GNU eqn tutorial which unfortunately doesn't seem to have ever been put under a free software license. Damian McGuckin has undertaken a replacement. My thanks to Werner for finding that unofficial obituary by John Whittington and removing the question mark. I didn't have the honor of interacting with Ted--I was dipping my toes in the water of the groff community in the same months he was climbing out of the pool--but I know that many of this list's subscribers did, and I figured people would want to know. Computer science and software engineering are young fields...but not as young as they once were. Regards, Branden [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2017-09/msg00058.html Apparently that status didn't percolate everywhere it should have in GNU's records, but enough did that Bertrand was able to function in the role.
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