Re: [Groff] Why is it...

[Robert Thorsby]

On 03/01/08 14:04:05, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Add to this, *roff does not conform to The
> > Debian Way (which includes derivatives,
> > such as *buntu). This means that *roff is
> > deprecated, and therefore obsolete.
> 
> For the record, I have no idea where this comes
> from, and it definitely doesn't correspond to
> either Debian policy or Ubuntu policy. ...
> 
> It sounds like either you're making some sarcastic
> point that I've missed, or your gripe is based on
> a bad experience with individual maintainers. ...
> 
> > Note, often *buntu does not include man pages for
> > many applications, even when the man pages are
> > particularly well documented, thus **proving**
> > that *roff is obsolete.
> 
> If manual pages are available and not distributed,
> that's a bug and should be filed as such. If they
> don't exist, that's still a bug, though not
> necessarily an urgent one.

As the author of the comments that caused so much umbrage to Colin I 
should like to reply (and this will be my last post regarding this 
thread).

You are correct. My comments were intended to be sarcastic (an emotion 
which I agree is unworthy) and were caused by my recent frustration 
with some *ubuntu packages.

I offer only the following:
1. Which is the latest version of groff in Debian/*ubuntu?

2. In Kubuntu 7.04 ImageMagick's convert utility did not work in 
accordance with its man page. In 7.10 the utility does not work at all, 
but this is compensated for, to some extent, by the man page which now 
doesn't work either. [Try to crop and then resize an image.]

My experience with The Debian Way is not restricted to these two 
examples.

Robert Thorsby