GSoC: BSD text tools

[Bakul Shah]

On Wed, 26 May 2010 16:54:35 +1000 Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at FreeBSD.org>  wrote:
> On Tuesday, 25 May 2010 at 16:16:10 -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> 
> This sounds too good to be true.  I'd certainly be in favour of such a
> change, *if* it proves feasible.

pkg_add -r plan9port

to play with these programs. People who use *roff a lot
should satisfy themselves p9p versions meet their needs.
[p9p has a lot of other goodies worth nibbling on]

There are two issues in integrating with BSD: licensing and
the amount of effort required.

For licensing issues a good place to start would be to look
at /usr/local/plan9/LICENSE (once you install the p9p port).
For what it's worth, my sense is that the relevant licenses
should allow bundling with *BSD but I am not a lawyer.

As for effort, p9p has already made the changes needed to
allow compiling with gcc (plan9 C is not std C but close
enough). p9p programs rely on a porting layer that emulates
some of plan9 environment.  If these porting/ported libraries
are imported into BSD, porting is almost a trivial task. If
you just want troff&co, I suspect one would need a small
subset of these libraries.  Only one way to find out!