I came in late. Apologies, I didn't realize there was discussion of the longer-term future going on under "space width". :-)
Peter Schaffter <[email protected]>: > Mine, too. My impression is that, under Werner's leadership, groff > has been brought as far as it can be without crumbling under the > weight of history. Groff is at a crossroads; either it remains the > "spiffified but encumbered with historical baggage" program that it > is, or it heads off in a new direction that, while respectful of the past, > is not a slave to it. I'm a very long-time groff contributor with a continuining interest in text formatting and typesetting. And I have to say, unfortunately, that I think the entire presentation-centric model within which groff lives just about run its course. The future belongs to structural markup and stylesheets, because of the requirement for rendering in multiple output media including the Web. The one thing I thing we could usefully salvage from the groff model is the notion of stacked DSLs for special formatting tasks - pic, eqn, grap, chem and the like. Cutting them loose from their groff-centric assumptions and making them generate more modern low-level formats like XSL-FO and SVG is a groff2 I could get behind (some of you may recall that I started in this direction a few years back by teaching eqn to emit MathXML). > Aye, there's the rub. I suspect I may have the leadership > qualities, but as anyone who goes through the mom code can see, I'm > a rather hamfisted programmer. Leading a project like this would > require skills I simply do not have. Peter, you have just earned my respect. That's a tough admission to make in a crowd like this, and having the stones to utter it anyway suggests to me that you may in fact have the qualities required to lead a project. One of those is a related sort of humility - never letting your ego get in the way of doing the right thinmg. As a project lead it is very helpful to be able to program as well as your senior devs, but it's not absolutely necessary. I cannot speak from direct experience, because my personal leadership style does lean heavily on having wizardly coding chops, but I have *seen* people do project leadership differently than me and successfully. You can lead a dev team by having good judgment and good taste and good timing about what should be done, and showing that through good communications skills. I have followed leaders with those traits in the past even when I could code rings around them on a purely technical level, and doubtless will again in the future. What I am trying to tell you is *don't fear trying*. Nothing that I know about you excludes the possibility that you would make an *excellent* project lead. And you'll only learn to do it by doing it. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
