Re: [Groff] Mission statement, second draft

[Pierre-Jean]

Hello folks,

Peter Schaffter <address@hidden> wrote:

> Here's the second draft of the mission statement, incorporating
> suggestions from Ingo, Eric, Pierre-Jean, and others.  It's starting
> to come into focus, although a third pass will probably be necessary
> before we commit to it.

I mostly agree with that second mission statement.

Nonetheless, I think that if the goal is to publish this
mission statement in the hope that it encourages people to
join the groff community, a bit more of « writing art » will
be needed: words that encourage someone to come and work on
groff.

Werner spoke about the clean codebase of groff, we could
also mention our experienced community and the precedence of
Knuth and Kernighan algorythms. The mention of some
"mentors" might also be important if some students whish to
work on groff. Last but not least, the Gnu project might
have some kind of help to give to groff developpers.

That kind of literacy should probably be part of another
document.

> 2.  Ingo's strategy...
> 3.  Eric's strategy...

We all have a strategy here. I've got mine: find a path to
minimize conflicts between heirloom troff and groff. These
different strategies are part of our recent difficulties,
and hopefully, we're gonna solve them.

It's important that we do not discover in a few month that
groff is a "cheval de Troie" for a goal that is finally not
dedicated to the groff project.

And I need some insurance that the man project is not such a
"cheval de Troie". These insurances might be:
- Don't forget the existing mdoc markup,
- Study several solutions,
- Don't use tricks to force the usage of that new markup
  but only arguments,
- Show a draft of the whole project.

This is a kind of literal hygiene mode for that discussion.

Cheers,

Pierre-Jean.