dwb : groff replacement proposal

[Steve Kargl]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 09:48:00PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 8:46 PM, Steve Kargl
> <sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 05:18:43AM +0200, Cyrille Lefevre wrote:
> >>
> >> seen on http://wiki.freebsd.org/ContribSoftware, groff have switch
> >> to GPLv3 license, so,
> >
> > So what? ?The version of groff in the src/ isn't
> > going to suddenly stop working. ?Please send this
> > type of email to free-advocacy or freebsd-chat.
> > It has no place here.
> 
> Steve,
>     I do see his point because bitrot software doesn't help, and apart
> from our toolchain and a few other things, a lot of the GNU software
> is being forced out eventually. groff hasn't been touched in ages
> however.

"groff hasn't been touched in ages" so FreeBSD suddenly can't
render its man pages?

Cyrille's post should have gone to freebsd-advocacy or -chat.
The fact that FSF is moving its software distributions to
GPLv3 isn't some state secret.

>     Regardless, there's already work being done to remedy this in the
> FreeBSD community; see:
> http://www.freebsdnews.net/2009/05/11/deprecating-groff-bsd-manual-display/
> for one link.

I'm aware of mdocml and other efforts.  None of these efforts
come close to replacing the functionality provided by the 
version of groff in src/.  The current version of groff in
FreeBSD meets FreeBSD needs.  Do you envision bitrot in
FreeBSD's groff that will go unnotice?  Do you envision an
in flux of man pages into FreeBSD that are written in 
mdoc (or other macro packages) that can't be rendered by 
FreeBSD's version of groff, but can be rendered by mdocml?

-- 
Steve