GSoC: BSD text tools

[Charlie Kester]

On Mon 24 May 2010 at 00:08:30 PDT Ben Fiedler wrote:
>I'll be working on replacing groff with mdocml (mandoc) in the system base
>(and yes, I am aware of Gordon's work on a man
>replacement<http://people.freebsd.org/%7Egordon/man.sh>).
>In addition, I will be creating or (more likely) porting BSD-ish licensed
>feature-complete replacements for: diff, sort, sdiff, diff3, also moving
>them into the base (and yes, I know of the bsddiff and bsdsort ports).
>Finally, I will perform some benchmark comparisons between these new tools
>and their GNU counterparts.
>
>More info is available at my project page:
>http://wiki.freebsd.org/SOC2010BenFiedler
>
>Any feedback or questions are most welcome.

I welcome this change, but groff is used for much more than manpages.
What happens to pic, tbl, and the other troff-related "little
languages"?  How can you say mdocml is "completely replacing" groff if
it doesn't support those kinds of things?

Is the thinking that groff has only been in base to support manpages?
If so, this project makes sense.  But even so, some clarification of the
intent is needed.