Re: [Groff] Choosing a portability target

[Larry Kollar]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> The groff project -- and I'm not sure what that means, other than
> "Werner Lemburg" -- is going to have to decide how much portability it
> wants.  There's a sort of sliding scale of difficulty here.
>
> Target 1: doclifter compatibility
>
> Target 2: man2html compatibility
>
> The patching I'm doing now will get us very close to this, possibly
> all the way there. ...
>
> Target 3: manServer compatibility
>
> Target 4: troff-classic compatibility
>
> Gunnar Ritter has just informed me that if we want these pages to  
> render
> under AIX, Solaris, and HP/UX troff, we need to stop using long names.
> All macro names would have to drop back to two characters.  (We would

My two cents:

I don't think it's necessary to go to Target 4. If sites are using  
Elder Troff, they won't have the groff pages anyway. As for other  
projects, it's up to their writers whether they want to support Elder  
Troff.

I don't have an opinion either way on Target 3. Personally, I think  
Target 2 is adequate.

--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
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