[another self-follow-up] At 2026-02-21T13:01:02-0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > The availability of groff, which included from early days not just > a reimplementation of man(7) but of its SunOS 4 variant, widely > considered by Berkeley acolytes to be the best realization of the > BSD system. (And just LOOK at how much money Bill Joy was > making!)
I managed to not properly construct the first sentence. I'll recast. Much of mdoc(7)'s reason for being was immediately undercut by the availability of groff, which included from early days not just a reimplementation of man(7) but of its SunOS 4 variant, widely considered by Berkeley acolytes to be the best realization of the BSD system. (And just LOOK at how much money Bill Joy was making!) Incidentally, this is why mdoc(7) partisans carry on at high volume and great length about its superiority to man(7)--because it has "semantic" macros. That's the only advantage it's retained since Net/2 in 1991. Unfortunately (or not), it has many such macros, which lengthens the learning process and discourages adoption. Documentation writers too often seem to adopt an attitude of indifference to semantic markup, which might explain man(7)'s persistent popularity, mdoc(7)'s relative lack of it, and the silence that has faced my proposals to extend the man(7) package--backwards-compatibly, even!--to embrace them. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-10/msg00034.html No matter what the environs, a horse that isn't thirsty won't drink. The wide popularity of non-semantic markup languages like Markdown and reStructured Text hints at a darker possibility: a lot of implementors suck at documenting their systems with semantic tools because thinking carefully about the semantics of their systems freezes them up. Regards, Branden
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