Hi Eric, Eric S. Raymond wrote on Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 11:22:51AM -0400:
> I've been replacing various ad-hoc simulations of tables in the groff > documentation with actual TBL markup. The reason for this is that > TBL tables can be parsed and lifted to XML-DocBook (enabling > generation of really high-quality HTML) whereas the various kluges > used to simulate them cannot be. What you are doing seems worthwhile to improve compatibility with other mdoc(7) parsers as well, for example mandoc(1). > Who is responsible for groff_mdoc(7)? The mdoc(7) language first appeared as a troff macro package in 4.4BSD, in 1993. It was accompagnied by two manual pages, themselves written using the mdoc(7) language: mdoc(7) - quick reference guide for the -mdoc macro package mdoc.samples(7) - tutorial sampler for writing BSD manuals with -mdoc The oldest SCCS checkins at Berkeley i can find are: mdoc(7) D 1.1 91/08/05 by Cynthia Livingston (USENIX) mdoc.samples(7) D 1.1 90/06/22 by cael as well When the mdoc macros were reimplemented for groff 1.17 in 2001, people realized that the quick mdoc(7) reference was rather brief and incomplete while mdoc.samples(7) - even though originally intended as a tutorial - did a better job even as a reference manual. So mdoc(7) got dropped and mdoc.samples(7) renamed to groff_mdoc(7). Yet, the meat of groff_mdoc(7) is still the same text already found in the old USENIX tutorial, and calling anybody a "maintainer" seems like a bold claim. So take care what you touch, you might end up as the new maintainer. ;-) > Would there be any objection to me converting that page to use > table markup for its tables? I wouldn't really object to that, but i think there is an alternative that might be worth considering. In 2009, Kristaps Dzonsons set out to write a real mdoc(7) reference manual from scratch. We have polished that one for three years now, and i consider it of reasonable quality by now. In particular, i personally made sure that no information contained in mdoc.samples(7) is missing from mdoc(7). On the other hand, mdoc.samples(7) is lacking various pieces of information, and some of the language is a bit vague, or at least it used to be last time i checked. Admittedly, the new mdoc(7) manual is still slightly mandoc(1)-centric, but if you were interested in including it in the groff distribution, i would be willing to clean that aspect up, and then we could maintain a common reference manual in the groff, mdocml.bsd.lv and openbsd.org trees; the latter two are already in sync now. I think that would provide a better quality manual with less work for everyone, and even without causing mdoc(7) to depend on tbl(7). Here are the code and sample output, it's ISC licensed, so inclusion in the groff distribution would cause no issues: http://mdocml.bsd.lv/cgi-bin/cvsweb/mdoc.7?cvsroot=mdocml http://mdocml.bsd.lv/mdoc.7.html What do you think? Ingo _______________________________________________ bug-groff mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-groff
