Re: [Groff] Using C with glib instead of C++ for groff

[Jim Reid]

C portability issues are a considerable way off topic. The thread was
about the proposed introducion of glib into groff. I'm strongly
against this. It's just not acceptable to make another open source-ish
library a dependency for installing and running groff. Virtually no
other open source software does this AFAIK. Forcing groff users to
download, configure and install glib so they can then install groff is
too awful for words. Not everyone has glib and/or g++ on their systems --
all the world isn't Linux you know -- or the time and energy to
install them.

Once groff starts down this slippery slope, who knows where it will
end? After the precedent is established, it will make it harder to
resist adding yet more gratuitous library dependencies that will
further complicate the job of installing and maintaining an up to date
version groff.

Does anyone else here remember the days when troff was written in C,
ran on 16-bit machines and didn't need fancy third-party libraries?