[Groff] GNU troff in OpenBSD

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi,

this mail is to inform you that i have just taken up maintainership
of groff in OpenBSD (www.openbsd.org), have updated the OpenBSD groff
port to release 1.21, have subscribed to the three groff mailing lists
at GNU.org and am planning to keep the OpenBSD groff port up to date
in a timely manner starting now.

Even though we are now using mandoc (mdocml.bsd.lv) to format base
system manuals, groff remains a crucial piece of software for
OpenBSD.  It continues to be the standard software for general roff
typesetting, and even for formatting manuals, thousands of ports
continue to rely on it.  Though some ports will probably switch
to mandoc, many will not, in particular those using GNU extensions
or non-mdoc(7), non-man(7) macro packages mandoc does not support.

Besides, we are using groff as the de-facto standard roff reference
implementation for mandoc development.  That is, even regarding
details of implementation-dependent parser and renderer behaviour,
we try to avoid diverging from groff/grotty behaviour unless there
are very good reasons to do so, in exceptional cases.  In particular,
i'm routinely running automated bulk comparisons of grotty and mandoc
output before changing mandoc source code, in order to prevent
gratuitious differences and incompatibilities.

Porting groff-1.21 was rather straightforward, i builds cleanly
nearly out of the box.  The two minor build system issues we
encountered have already been reported to bugs-groff@ by
Christian Weisgerber.  The remaining patches - see
  http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/textproc/groff/patches/
are mainly OpenBSD idiosyncracies irrelevant upstream.
Probably, i should try to clean up most of them in the future.

The following two contrib/ patches might be interesting for you;
they contain a short comment explaining the respective problem:
 * patch-contrib_groffer_Makefile_sub
 * patch-contrib_hdtbl_Makefile_sub (This one will definitely
   need a different fix upstream, in case you see a problem there.)
Just ignore the other patches...

Thanks a lot for having kept the roff language alive and maintained
all those years, and for your continuing development of groff!

Yours,
  Ingo