Re: [Groff] UTP ducoment translation, bloatware, and MS Offfice

[Rob Scovell]

xemacs is pretty large, but not bloated. Its largeness consists of useful 
stuff -- well, stuff that's useful for somebody, somewhere. There are 
*real* users out there who want to edit weird text (such as 'Latin' COMAL 
-- see http://www.interlingua.dk/historia/diverse/intercomal-1.htm ). So 
large does not equal bloated. MS Office is bloated because it's stuffed 
full of huge amounts of non-useful stuff. I have Word 2 on an old Mac 
LCIII and it processes words as quickly as Word 97 on my wife's PC. The 
two versions have the same paragraph formatting options, including 'Styles'
, and the same typographical nastiness. My one, however, doesn't have an 
animated paperclip, and it won't open my wife's files.

Someone once reported that there are huge chunks of binary code in a 
standard installation that never gets called.

The test for bloat vis a vis groff is whether it gets more useful as it 
gets bigger -- and if it can still run in its most minimalist form on 
machines dating back to the days of Babbage.

On Tuesday, August 27, 2002, at 09:32  PM, address@hidden wrote:

> I would like to point out that true-unix ways like RTFM and "use the 
> source Luke" are highly user-unfriendly. There is a difference between 
> growing and "bloat" that comes about because the Wintel alliance wants to 
> sell ever new computer systems. The only way to determine whether groff 
> became bloated, in my opinion, is to determine the least kind of a 
> computer system groff runs on. Is it a Minix system, or an ELKS system? 
> What CPU? How much HD space? All these questions would need answering, if 
> we were to condemn groff as a bloated system objectively.
> Janez Zemva _______________________________________________
> Groff maillist  -  address@hidden
> http://ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/groff