RMS says: "Use BSD, for goodness sake!"

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Dag-Erling [iso-8859-1] Smørgrav wrote:

Potentially stupid questions, but ...

> > bc - an undergrad could re-implement based on man page
>
> With a good arbitrary-precision math library, yes.  The one we have
> happens to be GPLed.

Is there anything at the operating system level that uses/requires bc, or
could it be moved to ports ... ?  Like, I use it, but its a command line
tool, not something I've seen used in scripts ...

> > groff - look at alternate doc formatting?
>
> Not bloody likely, unless you volunteer to convert all the man pages
> (including translations).

What was used before groff?  there was an nroff and troff before groff,
no?  or is it just that there are alot of 'groff-isms' that we're using in
the man pages?

> > less - re-implementable quite quickly
>
> You might be surprised...

... but any reason why its part of hte main system instead of just put
into ports?

> > man - could be re-implemented based on file format information known
>
> This is a SMOP.

SMOP? *raised eyebrow*