Re: [Groff] corrections of groff's README file

[Keith Marshall]

On Monday 23 May 2005 7:29 pm, Bernd Warken wrote:
> The file README.CVS in groff's top source directory contains information
> about tools that are needed to build groff from its source.  This
> information is not only necessary for the CVS version, but for all versions
> of the groff source.  So this information belongs to the file README
> instead.
>
> The existence of the file README.CVS forces that all CVS information in
> README should go to README.CVS.
>
> This email contains two patch files with the corresponding changements for
> README and README.CVS as attachment.

I don't mean to pour cold water on your efforts to improve these documents, 
but I have a number of issues with these patches:--

1) The corrections, and alternative wording I suggested yesterday have been
   completely ignored.

2) While you *do* need bison and texinfo to build from CVS, or from daily CVS
   snapshots, *neither* are required to build from a distribution tarball.

3) The bison 1.875b requirement is unnecessarily restrictive.  Bison 1.875
   was broken, so couldn't be used, but bison 1.35 is perfectly adequate;
   this may be equally true of some other earlier releases.

4) If GhostScript is unavailable, groff can still be built, but neither
   grohtml nor pdfroff will work; some users may not require these, in which
   case they don't need GhostScript to build groff.

5) The netpbm utilities are only required by grohtml, which also requires at
   least one of the psutils; if grohtml isn't required, then neither are
   these.  Even pdfroff can still work without these.

Regards,
Keith.