Re: [Groff] Re: Simplifying groff documentation

[Gunnar Ritter]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Gunnar Ritter <address@hidden>:
> > The other side of this is that you would either need to get
> > the new macros into the -man macros of AIX, HP-UX, and the
> > other remaining closed source Unix implementations, or you
> > should inform the maintainers that their manual pages become
> > less portable with such "fixes".
>
> I was under the impression that even these syustems are mostly using
> groff nowadays.  Is that not so?

This likely depends on whether their administrator finds
himself unable to maintain them without having tons of GNU
software installed before, or if he is not. I have met
people from both camps. The latter seem to originate mostly
from strict commercial shops where any installation that is
not part of a master plan is considered harmful.

The only production AIX machine I currently have access to,
a university server, has no groff installed, although there
are a lot of other GNU tools in /opt/freeware but outside
the default PATH. But this is a university server.

If you are using only few additional software as usual on a
production machine, there is no actual need to install groff
since manual pages are mostly portable to AT&T-derived nroff
-man in practice. We should not deliberately break that.

AIX troff, by the way, has not remained that primitive as
other commercial troff variants. It has some support for
internationalization; according to its manual page, it can
even output Chinese on some IBM printers.

        Gunnar