Re: [Groff] new groff directory structure

[Andy Dougherty]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> You must use the .mso request!  The example would then look like this:
> 
>   .nr N 2                 .\" Page header replaces footer on Page 1.
>   .ie \n(.g .mso tmac.m
>   .el .so /usr/lib/tmac/tmac.m

Ahh.  Thanks.  I can only plead age and ignorance and failure to read the
manual :-).  (I've been doing that particular idiom for at least 4
different troff's for at least 15 years.  It never occured to me to check
if groff had an enhanced .so request.)  Sorry about that.  I'll still have
to go back and hand-edit documents, but you can reasonably argue that's my
fault, not groff's.  And at least I'll only have to do it once.

> > I'm curious why this might be considered useful.  It's not at all
> > clear to me what is being accomplished.  (I helped design and
> > implement perl's versioned library structure, so I do have
> > considerable experience with the sorts of issues involved.)
> 
> It makes sense.  Consider how emacs is working.  I was in Tsukuba
> (Japan) this summer, working together with some core developers of
> Emacs and XEmacs -- these guys are running up to four different Emacs
> and XEmacs versions simultaneously!

I realized after sending my message that I had failed to consider
cross-system sorts of sharing.  That is, if the files in /usr/share/groff
are truly shared across systems (e.g. Solaris and AIX both sharing the
/usr/share filesystem (or even two Linux/386 systems), then it could well
be that you'd want to have 1.17.1 installed for say the Solaris systems
while you might want to keep 1.16.1 around for the AIX systems (e.g. if
there's some sort of porting or stability issue with AIX that can't be
instantly solved).  The versioned directories do handle that nicely.  

If the goal is to eventually have separate versions of groff all on the
same system (e.g. 1.16.1 and 1.17.1) running simultaneously and sharing a
directory tree, then there are still the problems that the associated
binaries (e.g. troff, pic, eqn, refer, etc.) don't have version numbers
and hence must be segregated somehow else.  It was *this* sort of issue
that puzzled me.  I don't use emacs, but my understanding is that at least
emacs and Xemacs have different binary names so both can be installed
simultaneously in /usr/local/bin.

Thanks for taking the time to explain things.  I appreciate it.
And thanks for the groff development work.

-- 
    Andy Dougherty              address@hidden
    Dept. of Physics
    Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042