Re: groff/-mandoc replacement

[Antti Kantee <pooka%cs.hut.fi@localhost>]

On Sun Mar 01 2009 at 15:48:42 +0000, Mindaugas Rasiukevicius wrote:
> Kristaps DÅonsons <kristaps%kth.se@localhost> wrote:
> > If anybody's interested in using groff for displaying BSD "mdoc" manual
> > pages, I'm actively looking for patches and problem reports for mdocml,
> > <http://mdocml.bsd.lv>.  Test!  Patch!
> > 
> > "mdocml is a suite of tools compiling `mdoc', the roff macro package for
> > BSD manual pages. The mission of mdocml is to deprecate groff, the GNU
> > roff implementation, for displaying BSD mdoc pages."
> > 
> > In other words, reliving base BSD systems of groff would be very nice.

Kristaps, nice work.  Good html support is an especially welcome
improvement.

We have a few man pages with tables, and while I'm not too worried about
them, adding very simple tbl support might be worthwhile.  See queue(3)
for an example.

> There was a very recent conversation about another reason to replace gproff,
> which was to avoid C++ so the userland could be compiled with pcc.
> 
> Just about the right time. Interesting!

We also have a few non-mdoc documents in src.  Again, I am not too
worried about these and we could move them to pkgsrc if we rip out groff.

However, I assume we would have to install groff for just about any 3rd
party package installing manual pages, since they are probably not going
to be in clean mdoc but rather a mix of ``an'' and other roff commands.
What would the command "man" do?  Would it become a frontend trying
to decide which command to execute based on the path the manpage is
found from?