Hi Alex, At 2024-12-20T12:11:00+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > On Thu, Dec 19, 2024 at 09:31:49PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > For some vendors, the end of the Unix Wars meant the end of > > development. Lay off all the engineers and collect rents from > > locked-in enterprise deployments. Share price go up. > > That's the moment when they deserve dropping support for their > systems. That will hopefully help in killing them, even if only a > little bit.
I won't mourn the deaths of indifferently maintained legacy Unix systems. But I also want to keep groff, a better *roff than AT&T troff, available as a clarion to awaken their users from their dogmatic, proprietarian slumbers. > I need to keep portability to mandoc(1), which I'll keep doing as long > as mandoc(1) keeps doing their part on adding support for groff's > man(7) new features. I'm confident Ingo would prefer that I govern the pace of new feature additions to groff man(7) as sternly as possible. ;-) > groff(1) and mandoc(1) are universal, though. Isn't groff(1) portable > to practically every system? I'm not sure what our portability story to non-POSIX systems is these days. We used to have one. Granted, MS-DOS used to matter more... > As GNU make(1) maintainer says (IIRC), don't write portable Makefiles, > write GNU Makefiles, and port GNU make(1). These days the maintainer is Paul Smith. I don't know if he said that originally, but POSIX 2024 make is _vastly_ improved over that of previous editions of the standard. I was just last night reading a book with a chapter on Make from _1997_ and I was appalled at how current it _still_ had been, with respect to "standard" Make, until earlier this year. Things are _much_ better now. https://gist.github.com/Earnestly/29deee4f18346da6630ed1df760f1590 Pick up those new standard Makefile features and push them as hard as you can. Drop in a '.POSIX:' and see how far you can now go. And of course you can keep using GNU Make while you do so. Regards, Branden
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