Hi Branden, G. Branden Robinson wrote on Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 08:18:03PM -0500:
> Would someone like to take up maintainership of it? :) I think this question is so outrageously misguided that it matters to speak up and say how bad this advice really is. Normally, even if code is of rather poor quality, i'm all for cleaning it up and slowly, incrementally, making things better such that eventually, it will maybe reach tolerable quality at some point in the future. But there is a limit to that. Some time ago, i looked at the code in contrib/hdtbl. The design, architecture, and implementation of that code is of extremely bad quality in almost any conceivable way. It would be so hard to "fix" this mess that i'm very convinced it would be nothing but a fool's errand not worth the effort. A software engineer of limited experience will likely be totally lost trying to work on it because it is so bad, and a highly qualified engineer who might theoretically be able to fix it in a gargantuan effort of refactoring and repairing would mostly be wasting their time and could do so much more useful work in other areas instead. So, Branden, please, unless you want to trick people into getting hurt by stumbling into use- and hopeless tasks, don't say such things. This totally crappy code should never have been allowed into the GNU roff project. It is not fit for public consumption. Including it was a deplorable mistake in the first place. Of course, deleting bad stuff after the fact is always harder than rejecting it up front and often meets some opposition because some people use it without realizing how bad it really is. They can't even be blamed, they may have thought "it's part of groff, so it can't be that bad." Except it is. So just deleting it would still be the best option even now. Yours, Ingo
