Re: Not Groff! Heirloom Doctools!

[matthew sporleder <msporleder%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 3:32 PM, Greg A. Woods <woods%planix.ca@localhost> wrote:
> At Thu, 04 Jun 2015 14:53:56 +0200, Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote:
> Subject: Re: Groff
>>
>> On 2015-06-04 12:44, Robert Swindells wrote:
>> >
>> > Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote:
>> >
>> > > What happened to the original roff? I mean, groff is just a gnu
>> > > replacement for roff. Maybe switch back to the original?
>> >
>> > The sources to all of DWB are available from AT&T:
>> >
>> > <http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/download/>
>> >
>> > It needs a bit of work to get it to build on NetBSD though.
>>
>> Hmm. What about roff from 2.11BSD? That shouldn't be so hard to get
>> building on NetBSD...
>
> Have my posts since 2009 about Heirloom Doctools somehow mostly going
> into a black hole or something!?!?!?!  I get responses of "yes, please!"
> on the lists, but nothing happens and people still keep posting truly
> lame suggestions as if they've never heard of Heirloom Doctools.  I
> posted about it in a response to this very thread just three days ago
> (though I redirected to tech-userlevel then too)!
>
> Yes, sorry Johnny, but your suggestion really is poor.  Ancient troff,
> was a poor fit for "modern" use even 25 years ago with psroff to
> generate PostScript from its C/A/T output -- it's full of bugs and
> missing tons of features (beyond being device independent), and still
> written in what's basically PDP11 assembler dressed up as C (i.e. it's
> missing all of BWK's extensive rework), never mind that it's not
> actually in the original 2.11BSD release, which contains just Berkeley's
> bits (and the same small bits are in the 4.4BSD release too).
>
> Heirloom Doctools _is_ the original troff, in its very latest form!
> (well, there's a fork on github that's got a bunch more bug fixes)
>
> A better place to get the original troff, in modern form, with an
> open-source license would be Plan-9.
>
> However Heirloom Doctools is equivalent to the Plan-9 version, but
> without Plan-9 dependencies, and with more fixes and features.
> I.e. Heirloom Doctools are the very most up-to-date code from the very
> people who wrote and maintained it since the beginning (sans Joe
> Ossanna, of course) .
>
> Back before 2009 it already produced PDFs and handled UTF-8.
>
> Heirloom Doctools already builds and works on NetBSD just fine, and
> has done so since before 2009 (advertised as working on 2.0 in 2007).
>
> Heirloom Doctools is the essentially the complete set of tools from the
> AT&T Documenter's Work Bench suite -- i.e. it contains all the other
> _necessary_ pre-processors like eqn, pic, tbl, grap, refer, and vgrind,
> and it contains the back-end drivers and font tables for PostScript and
> PDF and other printers.  The only thing it's really missing are the
> papers from /usr/{share/}doc, but those are freely available elsewhere,
> including from the DWB release.
>
> As I discussed back in 2009, Heirloom Doctools is essentially better
> quality and far more feature-full than the last DWB release, and
> arguably has a much better license, and of course DWB since 2009 is
> probably never going to see another public maintenance release now that
> Glen Fowler has retired.  The only thing DWB has over Heirloom Doctools
> is arguably better PostScript support (oh, and 'pm', but it's C++ :-)).
>
> Why do people keep forgetting about it, and WTF are we still waiting for?
>
> (once again re-directing to tech-userlelvel where this discussion is
> more apropos)
>
> --
>                                                 Greg A. Woods
>                                                 Planix, Inc.
>
> <woods%planix.com@localhost>       +1 250 762-7675        http://www.planix.com/


Looks like they were just put into pkgsrc too.