GSoC: BSD text tools

[Bakul Shah]

On Wed, 26 May 2010 01:21:20 +0300 Eitan Adler <lists at eitanadler.com>  wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Matthew Jacob <mj at feral.com> wrote:
> > On 5/25/2010 9:52 AM, Julian Elischer wrote:
> >>
> >> On 5/25/10 8:33 AM, Eitan Adler wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> No. Do not remove groff or associated tools from /usr/src !
> >>>> Roff has been in Unix /usr/src since '77 or earlier.
> >>>> A lot of people use tools from that descendancy as production tools.
> >>>
> >>> So? If it isn't a very commonly used tool and isn't necessary for 99%
> >>> of cases I don't seem the harm of removing it from base and making it
> >>> a port?
> >>
> >> BSD has always =C2=A0been ab;e to produce it's documentation as part of =
> its
> >> build
> >>
> >> Please keep this true.
> >
> This is what mdocml will be for. I never advocated removing the
> utilities required for building documentation from the base - just the
> soon to be superfluous groff utility (once the GSOC project is done).

mdocml handles -mdoc and -man but not other formats. There
are documents in /usr/src/share/doc needing -ms and -me etc.
groff can't be replaced with mdocml.

If you must kick groff out, why not "port" plan9 troff which
now does unicode, has 27 macro packages including ms, weighs
in at about 10K lines of C code written by Joe Ossanna, Brian
Kernighan, Ken Thompson, Jaap Akkerhuis & others, is now open
source (subject to Lucent Public License), and traces its
lineage back to Joe Ossanna's original troff?  There is also
pic, tbl, eqn and grap (for drawing graphs).  Also
troff2html.  AFAIK plan9 troff doesn't do dvi but I think
most people can live with that.

All of these already work under FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS &
others as part of Plan 9 from User space.  Integrating them
into FreeBSD base is bound to be far easier than replicating
its functionality.

See http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/troff.pdf for troff
details, http://www.swtch.com/plan9port for Plan9 from
User Space.