Thanks for the info.  I don't see the need for ms / nroff going away; I do
see it becoming much more of an "optional" addition to the system though --
and ideally I'd like to defer "sustaining" (as if it is sustained) to a
source tree that is outside of illumos-gate.  It's unclear if there is
sufficient merit in moving it to warrant the effort though.

Its a question for later, orthogonal to the integration of mandoc, and the
switch to mdoc format for man pages.


On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 11:44 AM, Darren Reed <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 15/07/2014 8:04 AM, Garrett D'Amore via illumos-discuss wrote:
> > ...
> >>> f) There are folks actually continuing to sustain and improve this tool
> >> chain.  Solaris (err AT&T) derived troff and nroff by comparison are
> >> practically dead, and almost undebuggable with horrible code written
> back
> >> when linkers didn't support symbols with more than 6 characters in them.
> >>
> >>
> >> So what happens to our nroff/troff? Do they get torched?
> >>
> > Good question.  I'd torch them if it were up to me.  I suppose in theory
> > someone might have some content in .ms or something like that (I wrote
> > papers in .ms macros when I was in school).    My preference would be to
> > eject them from the illumos-gate, and let folks get them from another
> > repository if they really want them.  My gut is that nobody uses these
> for
> > anything except man pages.
> >
>
> Documents that aresubmitted to the IETF in ASCII text for consideration
> as RFC publications are still required to be written in "ms" format.
>
> Whilst submissions areaccepted in many formats, nroff is still accepted
> and used. For many it is the text format of choice in this regard.
>
> Whether or not this is too peripheral to warrant remaining, I'll leave
> to yourself and others to debate.
>
> For more information see:
>
> http://www.rfc-editor.org/formatting.html
>
> Cheers,
> Darren
>
>



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